Flag of Tonga

What the flag of Tonga looks like

The flag of Tonga has a plain red field with a white rectangle, the canton, in the top left corner next to the flagpole. In the canton is a red cross with arms of equal length, known in heraldry as a couped cross because its arms do not reach the edges. The flag is twice as wide as it is tall, with a ratio of 1:2.

The red and white scheme is bold and easy to tell apart from other Pacific flags. For image files see the Tonga flag download page, and the emoji is at /tonga/emoji/.

Tonga flag meaning and symbolism

The flag expresses the Christian faith of the Kingdom of Tonga. The red cross alludes to Christianity, the white stands for purity, and the red evokes the blood of Christ shed in the crucifixion.

English Wesleyan Methodist missionaries arrived in the 1820s and converted the chief Taufaʻahau in 1831. Today about 97% of Tongans are Christian.

History of the Tonga flag

Taufaʻahau, a chief converted to Methodism in 1831, became King George Tupou I in 1845. The first Tongan flag, from around the 1840s, was white with crosses at the four corners and the letters A and M in the center. Wanting a flag that would represent Christianity, the king sought a new design. An earlier version with a red cross on a plain white field turned out to be almost identical to the emblem of the International Red Cross (adopted 1863), so the cross was moved into a canton on a red field, a design first used in 1866.

The king worked on the flag, coat of arms and anthem with the missionary Shirley Baker, who later became prime minister; Whitney Smith names Prince Uelingatoni Ngu Tupoumalohi as the chief designer. The design was codified in the constitution proclaimed on 4 November 1875. Article 47 says the flag can never be altered.

Tonga was never fully colonized. It became a British protected state in 1900 under a treaty of friendship, which gave Britain control of foreign affairs, and became fully independent again within the Commonwealth on 4 June 1970. The flag stayed the same through that period.

Tonga flag and the Swiss flag

The Tongan flag is sometimes mistaken for a reversed Swiss flag, because both combine a red field with a cross. The Swiss flag is square, with a white cross centered on red, while Tonga's is rectangular and the red cross sits inside a white canton. For more Pacific designs see the Oceania flags page.