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Bangladesh

Peoples Republic of Bangladesh, Gana Prajatantri Bangladesh

image by Željko Heimer
Flag adopted 13 January 1972, coat of arms adopted February 1971.

See also:

Civil and State Flag

Red disc on green field. The disc is set slightly toward the hoist so that when the flag is flying it will appear to be in the center. Many illustrations (and probably actual flags, too) have the circle in the center in error, for example, the British Admiralty's Flags of All Nations - 1989. I do not know if the circle was centered when it also included the yellow map of the country. At home I have an example of a Bangladeshi postage stamp ca 1971 with the map on the flag, and I think it shows the circle in the center.
Nick Artimovich, 26 August 1997

The red circle should actually be shifted towards the hoist since 1972. The previous flag (1971-1972) had a centered red disc with a yellow map silhouette of Bangladesh.
Jan Zrzavy, 26 August 1997

The national flag is bottle green in color and rectangular in size with the length to width ratio of 10:6 bearing a red circle on the body of the green. The red circle has a radius of one fifth of the length of the flag. Its center is placed on the middle of the perpendicular drawn from the nine twentieth part of the flag. The background colour symbolizes the greenery of Bangladesh with its vitality and youthfulness while the red disc represents the rising sun and the sacrifice our people made to obtain our independence.
Prescribed sizes of the flag for buildings are 305cm x 183cm, 152cm x 91cm and 76cm x 46cm and for vehicles are 38cm x 23cm and 25cm x 15cm.
Collected from http://www.virtualbangladesh.com/bd_flag.html by Dov Gutterman, 23 December 1998.

(See also the Construction Sheet)
Santiago Dotor, 26 February 2001

Civil Ensign

image by Željko Heimer

Red, with the national flag in canton.
Jan Zrzavy, 16 January 1998

1971 Flag

image by Jorge Candeias, 29 May 1999

The first flag of Bangladesh. I don't know what the official proportions were, but I have used 2:3 as it seems reasonable to assume that the Pakistani practice would have continued for a while. Someone quoted Whitney Smith as saying that the map was omitted because of the difficulty involved in displaying it correctly on both sides. I have some doubts about this explanation: Cyprus has overcome the problem of a two-sided flag, as has Saudi Arabia. Another explanation suggests itself: namely, that the map may have been an unpleasant reminder of the partition of Bengal.
Vincent Morley, 1 September 1997

The first flag of the independence movement. The flag initially had the the map of Bangladesh in gold in the center of the red circle. This was the original design of the flag of Bangladesh that the valiant freedom fighters fought under during the liberation war. On the 3rd March 1971, ASM Abdur Rab, the then VP of Dhaka University Students´ Union hoisted the flag for the first time at the historic Dhaka University location known as "bawt-tawla". This flag was also raised at the then Dhaka Race Course at then Ramna Racecourse (now Shuhrawardy Uddayan) when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman gave his historic speech proclaiming "this struggle is the struggle for liberation."
(The "bawt-tawla" incidently means the shade of the banyan tree in Bengali. This was, and still is, a popular meeting place for activist students of the University of Dhaka.)
Collected from http://www.virtualbangladesh.com/bd_flag.html by Dov Gutterman, 23 December 1998.

Reverse of 1971 Flag

by Jorge Candeias, 29 May 1999

I believe the map ought to be correct on both sides. Pedersen refers to the difficulty of rendering the map correct on both sides of the flag leading to dropping the map.
Ole Andersen, 25 May 1999

Erroneous 1971 flag reports

image by Falko Schmidt

Browsing in my files I found a flag, published in an East German journal (NBI - Neue Berliner Illustrierte 13/73) and illustrated here. I don't know, if this flag was ever used. Can anyone help?
Falko Schmidt, 29 September 2001

This flag is similar to one that I found on a flag plate in Dicionário Enciclopédico Koogan Larousse Selecções (Encyclopedic Dictionary Koogan Larousse Selecções), vol. 1. The disc is a lot smaller and it's not red, rather somewhere between purple and pink (lilac?). This colour isn't due to some glitch in the printing of the source, since adjacent flags that have red in them are perfectly normal (see image here). If so, and given the lack of any evidence (at least so far) that such a design was used, then I guess it is a case of perpetuating an error from one source to another. It appears to be erroneous.
Jorge Candeias, 2 October 2001, 6 February 2005

Origin of the Flag

Modified from http://www.banglarglimpse.com/prelibhist.htm:

"The national flag of Bangladesh was a product first conceived by painter Quamrul Hasan. On the 3rd March 1971, ASM Abdur Rab the then VP of Dhaka University Students' Union had the honour of hoisting the first flag of independent Bangladesh at the Dhaka University premises popularly known as Bat-tala.
Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman hoisted the flag of independent Bangladesh at his residence, 32 Dhanmondi R/A, at the outskirt of Dhaka, on the 23rd March 1971. It was an unknown Awami League worker who hoisted the first flag of independence at the historical meeting at the then Ramna Race-course on the 7th March 1971 where Sheikh Mujib tacitly called for armed struggle against Pakistani occupation Army.

For Quamrul Hasan, making and shaping of the flag needed several months t