Flag of Vietnam

What the flag of Vietnam looks like

The flag of Vietnam is one of the simplest national flags in the world. It has a red field with a single yellow star, and nothing else. The proportions are 2:3, and the star is centered both horizontally and vertically. Its points are straight, and one of them points straight up.

The red is a bright, warm red and the star is a pure yellow, often described as golden. The star is large for a national flag. Because it has no emblem, border or text, the flag is easy to draw and to recognize from far away. You can see how it looks as an icon on the Vietnam flag emoji page, or get image files on the download page.

The design is sometimes confused with the flag of China, which is also red with yellow stars, but the Chinese flag has five stars set in the upper left corner. Morocco's flag is red with a green pentagram, and a number of other flags use a red field with a star, so the color of the star and its position are the quickest way to tell them apart.

Vietnam flag meaning and symbolism

The red background is most often said to represent revolution and the blood shed in the struggle for national independence. The golden star is said to symbolize the soul of the nation, and its yellow color represents the Vietnamese ethnicity, from the idea of the yellow color of the people's skin. Yellow or gold has also been a traditional color of Vietnam for a very long time.

The five points of the star are commonly explained as the five main classes of Vietnamese society: intellectuals, farmers, workers, entrepreneurs (traders) and soldiers. These are traditional explanations rather than a legal definition: the constitution describes the flag as red with a bright five-pointed golden star in the middle, and does not list meanings for each element.

History of the Vietnam flag

The red flag with a yellow star first appeared in southern Vietnam in 1940, during the Nam Kỳ (Cochinchina) uprising against French colonial rule. Its design is traditionally credited to Nguyễn Hữu Tiến, a leader of the uprising who was executed by the French on 28 August 1941, though in 2001 Vietnam's Ministry of Culture reported that there was no documentation to support this, and another cadre, Lê Quang Sô, has also been named as the designer. The flag was displayed at the conference of 19 May 1941 at which the Việt Minh, the independence front led by Hồ Chí Minh, was founded.

The Việt Minh proclaimed it a national flag on 17 August 1945. Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945 and signed a decree adopting the flag on 5 September, and the National Assembly voted to adopt it on 2 March 1946. The design was modified on 30 November 1955, when the star was made smaller and its rays straighter. That is the design in use now.

When North and South Vietnam were unified in 1976 as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the flag of the north became the flag of the whole country. Yellow and red have long been common colors on Vietnamese flags, and under the French the country was divided into protectorates and a colony that flew the French flag and other flags.

The South Vietnam flag and other old Vietnamese flags

Several flags were used in Vietnam before 1975, and they are often searched for separately. The best known is the flag of South Vietnam, which has a yellow field with three horizontal red stripes across the middle. The design was adopted for the State of Vietnam by an ordinance of 2 June 1948 and was later also used by its successor, the Republic of Vietnam, the country in the south that lasted until the fall of Saigon in 1975. The three stripes are said to represent the Quẻ Càn (Qian) trigram, the divination sign for heaven, and are also popularly read as the three regions of Vietnam.

North Vietnam, officially the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, used the red flag with the yellow star. The National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, whom Americans called the Viet Cong, had its own flag, modelled on that of North Vietnam: two horizontal halves, red over blue, with a yellow star in the middle. The NLF adopted it on 20 December 1960, and it was also the flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, proclaimed in 1969, until reunification in 1976.

Today the yellow flag with three red stripes is not an official flag in Vietnam. It is widely used by Vietnamese communities abroad, who call it the Heritage and Freedom Flag, and it has been recognized by a number of US states and cities. The government of Vietnam objects to its display.