History
From 1952 until the fall of the royal government in 1975 the country had a red flag, with a white three-headed elephant (the god Erawan) in the middle. On top of the elephant is a nine-folded umbrella, while the elephant itself stands on a five-level pedestal. The white elephant is a common royal symbol in Southeast Asia, the three heads referred to the three former kingdoms Vientiane, Luangprabang, and Champasak which made up the country. The nine-folded umbrella is also a royal symbol, originating from Mount Meru in the Buddhist cosmology. The pedestal represented the law on which the country rested.
The Western heraldic blazon is a banner Gules, a Spanish fess azure charged with a plate. This new flag has replaced the one used since 1952.
Read more about this topic: Flag Of Laos
Famous quotes containing the word history:
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)