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To start off with, here is Nepal's flag:
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| The current flag of Nepal |
The first thing you probably noticed was that it is not a quadrilateral like every other national flag on the planet. The second thing was probably either "that is wonderful," or "why would anyone choose that as their state flag?"
To answer the question of why the flag is shaped so distinctly, one must go back quite a ways. In fact to around 800 BC (or much earlier by some accounts) when the Kirat people inhabited the Nepal area. Their flag looked like this:
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| Image: Danesh Rai |
So the answer to the question may be "it is... because it always was." Because that's not very satisfying, at least not to me, maybe learning about the meaning of the flag will help. The two most oft-quoted reasons are that it symbolizes the Himalayan Mountains, and it's representative of the two dominant religions in the area: Hinduism and Buddhism, but these both seem a bit retcon to me.
This site has a much more satisfying answer to both the question of the flags meaning and the reasons behind its shape. Two separate branches of the Rana Dynasty which ruled the area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had two different pennons (which are the essentially the same as the triangular collegiate pennants) for each branch, and in 1962, when the constitution was written, the flags were combined into the familiar flag we see today
...But how would you go about making it, or writing down that shape? In 1962, they couldn't simply attach a .jpeg to their constitution, so they came up with another way.
<sidenote>
Remember back in high school geometry class when you learned all about geometric constructions? What real world application did that ever have? The answer, it turns out, is basically zero, but not quite zero. As it happens, if you want to create your very own Nepalese flag you'll need to call upon these ancient skills.
</sidenote>
Remember back in high school geometry class when you learned all about geometric constructions? What real world application did that ever have? The answer, it turns out, is basically zero, but not quite zero. As it happens, if you want to create your very own Nepalese flag you'll need to call upon these ancient skills.
</sidenote>
Written into Schedule 1, of the Nepalese Constitution (Scroll to the very bottom) is a detailed geometric construction of the county's flag. This is in fact the only correct way to produce the flag according to the countries law.
Here is a great video produced by Brady Haran at Numberphile that led me to this topic.
After watching this video, I decided to make my own Nepalese Flag and I headed off to the FedEx store. I acquired a poster board and a sheet of brown paper that measured about 6'x5' and went to work. After about an hour, using nothing but a compass a straight edge and a length of string, I came up with this:
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| My very own Nepalese flag |
It looks lovely above the television in my living room.
If, for some reason you didn't get you fill of geometric constructions after the Nepal flag video, this should certainly slake your odd thirst for geometry:
- Scott
LINKSTORM (I'll add possibly interesting links to the end of each post; just unrelated things I've run across):
Here is a great video of a group that sang the same song though many different genres of Western Music
This is a long video, but to me it's downright therapeutic to watch someone make something from scratch that turns out beautifully
Did you know humans emit visible light??
This is a great map of interconnected flavors
(Here is a high resolution)
(Here is an NPR story about it)
This is just lovely. Back to the Future meets surfing
This is an interactive topography map, and I never knew I wanted one of these.
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