22 sovereign states fly a national flag built around a single circle, counting the flags Wikipedia's "List of national flags by design" places under one centred or one off-centre circle: 15 put the circle in the middle and 7 set it off-centre. The plainest and best known is Japan's red disc on white, used as the merchant flag since 1870, followed by Bangladesh's red disc on green and Palau's yellow full moon on light blue. The rest put something inside the circle (a crescent, a crane, a 24-spoked wheel, a night sky with 27 stars) or draw it as a sun with rays. Rings made of separate stars, such as Cape Verde's ten, are counted separately below.
All 22 national flags with a circle, in one table
The table lists every member alphabetically within its position group, with what the circle contains and the year the present design was adopted. Where a flag was first used earlier and only later fixed in law, the note says so.
| Country | What the circle shows | Position | Adopted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Belize | White disc holding the coat of arms | Centre | 1981 |
| Brazil | Blue starry globe with 27 stars and a motto band | Centre | 1889 (27 stars since 1992) |
| Burundi | White disc with three red stars | Centre | 1967 (ratio changed 1982) |
| Dominica | Red disc with a sisserou parrot | Centre | 1978 |
| Ethiopia | Blue disc with a gold pentagram | Centre | 1996 |
| Grenada | Red disc with a yellow star | Centre | 1974 |
| India | Navy Ashoka Chakra, 24 spokes | Centre | 1947 |
| Japan | Plain red sun disc | Centre | 1870 (in law 1999) |
| Laos | Plain white disc | Centre | 1975 |
| Niger | Plain orange disc | Centre | 1959 |
| North Macedonia | Yellow sun with eight rays | Centre | 1995 |
| Paraguay | Round seals, different on each side | Centre | 1842 (revised 2013) |
| South Korea | Red and blue taegeuk | Centre | 1948 |
| Tunisia | White disc with red crescent and star | Centre | 1831 (republic 1959) |
| Uganda | White disc with a grey crowned crane | Centre | 1962 |
| Bangladesh | Plain red disc | Towards the hoist | 1972 |
| Kazakhstan | Gold sun with 32 rays | Off-centre, beside a hoist ornament | 1992 |
| Namibia | Yellow sun with 12 rays | Upper hoist triangle | 1990 |
| North Korea | White disc with red star | Towards the hoist | 1948 |
| Palau | Plain yellow disc (full moon) | Towards the hoist | 1981 |
| Portugal | Armillary sphere behind the shield | On the green–red boundary | 1911 |
| Rwanda | Gold sun with 24 rays | Upper fly corner | 2001 |
Plain discs: Japan, Bangladesh, Laos, Niger and Palau
Five flags use a circle with nothing inside it, and they are the purest members of the group. Japan's flag is officially the Nisshōki, "flag of the sun", but is usually called the Hinomaru, "circle of the sun". A proclamation of 27 February 1870 made the sun disc the flag for merchant ships and another that October the navy's flag, but no law named a national flag until the Act on National Flag and Anthem took effect on 13 August 1999. The disc's diameter is three-fifths of the flag's height.
Bangladesh adopted its red disc on dark green on 17 January 1972. The 1971 version used during the Liberation War carried a yellow map of the country inside the disc; it was dropped partly because a map is hard to render correctly on both sides of a flag. The disc is set slightly towards the hoist so that it looks centred when the cloth flies. The most widely accepted reading is that green stands for the land and the red disc, like a rising sun, for those who died in 1971.
Palau borrowed the same off-centre placement on 1 January 1981, when it left the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Its golden disc is a full moon rather than a sun, on a light blue field for the Pacific. Laos also shows a moon: its white disc, four-fifths the height of the central blue band, is said to be a full moon over the Mekong. The design was first flown by the Lao Issara government of 1945–46, kept by the Pathet Lao, and made the national flag when they took power in 1975. Niger completes the set with an orange disc on an orange, white and green tricolour adopted on 23 November 1959, a year before independence from French West Africa; the disc is generally read as the sun, though no official text confirms it.
Emblem discs in Tunisia, North Korea and East Africa
Eight flags use the circle as a frame for an emblem; five of them are in North Africa, East Asia and East Africa. The oldest is Tunisia's: a white disc on red holding a red crescent wrapped around a red star. Bey Hussein II created a flag close to it after the Battle of Navarino in 1827, approved it in 1831, and the republic confirmed it on 1 June 1959, with a 1999 law fixing its proportions. North Korea's white disc holds a red five-pointed star near the hoist, adopted with the country's first constitution on 8 September 1948.
In Africa, Burundi, in a design adopted on 28 June 1967 after the monarchy's royal drum was dropped, places a white disc where its white saltire crosses, carrying three red six-pointed stars that stand for the Hutu, Twa and Tutsi and for the motto "Unity, Work, Progress". Ethiopia added a blue disc with a gold pentagram to its green, yellow and red tricolour on 31 October 1996; the tricolour itself dates from 11 October 1897 under Menelik II. Uganda's white disc holds a grey crowned crane over six bands of black, yellow and red, a design adopted at independence on 9 October 1962.
Caribbean emblem discs: Grenada, Dominica and Belize
Three island and Central American flags put national symbols inside a disc. Grenada's red disc holds a yellow star at the centre of a flag with six more stars in its red border and a nutmeg at the hoist, adopted in 1974. Dominica's red disc, which stands for justice, carries the sisserou parrot, a species found only on the island, making the 1978 flag by playwright Alwin Bully one of the few national flags with purple. Belize's white disc holds the full coat of arms, held by a mestizo and a man of African descent, with mahogany trees, logging tools and the motto Sub Umbra Floreo ("Under the Shade I Flourish"); adopted on independence day, 21 September 1981, it is the only national flag with human figures as a major element.
Wheels, globes and spheres: India, Brazil, South Korea, Portugal and Paraguay
Five circles carry more complex symbols. India's navy-blue Ashoka Chakra has 24 evenly spaced spokes. It replaced the spinning wheel (charkha) of the Congress Party's Swaraj flag when the Constituent Assembly adopted the tricolour on 22 July 1947, weeks before independence on 15 August.
Brazil's blue disc is a picture of the sky over Rio de Janeiro on 15 November 1889, the day the republic was proclaimed; the flag was adopted four days later. A white band carries the motto Ordem e Progresso, and the stars, one per state plus the Federal District, have been added over time to reach 27, the last four in 1992. South Korea's Taegeukgi, adopted in 1948, puts a red and blue taegeuk at the centre of a white field with a black trigram in each corner; its predecessors were flown under the Joseon dynasty and the Korean Empire.
Portugal's flag, announced after the revolution of 5 October 1910 and confirmed by decree on 30 June 1911, sets an armillary sphere, a navigational instrument of rings, behind the national shield on the line between green and red. Paraguay is the oddest member: the obverse shows the round national seal, a yellow star in a wreath, and the reverse shows the treasury seal, a lion under a red Phrygian cap. It is the only national flag whose two sides differ.
Suns inside the circle: Kazakhstan, Namibia, Rwanda and North Macedonia
Four flags turn the disc into a sun by adding rays. Kazakhstan's gold sun has 32 rays above a soaring steppe eagle on turquoise, designed by Shaken Niyazbekov and adopted on 4 June 1992. Namibia's twelve-rayed yellow sun sits in the blue upper triangle of a flag adopted on 21 March 1990, merged from three designs by Theo Jankowski, Don Stevenson and Ortrud Clay. Rwanda's 24-rayed gold sun in the top fly corner, by Alphonse Kirimobenecyo, dates from 31 December 2001. North Macedonia's yellow sun spreads eight broadening rays to the edges of a red field; Miroslav Grčev's design was adopted on 5 October 1995, after a Greek embargo forced the removal of the Vergina Sun used from 1992. These and the other rayed suns are covered in our list of flags with suns.
When the circles arrived: 1831 to 2001
Grouped by the year each current design was adopted, the list splits into an old core and a large post-1945 majority. Only four of today's 22 circle flags were in use before 1900: Tunisia, Paraguay, Japan and Brazil. Portugal's is the only one from the first half of the 20th century. The other 17 all date from after 1945, most of them from decolonisation and the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
Near misses: rings of stars, wreaths and Greenland
Some flags look as if they belong but are left off the main list because the circle is implied rather than drawn. Cape Verde's flag of 25 September 1992 sets ten yellow stars, one for each island, in a ring over its red stripe. Eritrea's flag of 5 December 1995 has a gold wreath of 30 leaves, one for each year of the independence struggle, around an olive branch. The Cook Islands, in free association with New Zealand, use a ring of 15 white stars, and the European Union's flag has its circle of twelve gold stars; both appear in our guide to flags with stars in a circle.
Other circle flags belong to territories rather than sovereign states. Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, flies a red and white disc set off-centre across a white and red field, which its designer described as the sun half sunk in the ocean. Australia's Christmas Island and the Dutch Caribbean island of Bonaire also carry circles. And one has gone: Zaire's flag of 1971 to 1997 had a central disc, replaced when the country became the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Several of the plain-disc designs are close enough to cause confusion, as our piece on flags that look alike shows.