Flag: Thailand Emoji

The flag of Thailand, the Trairanga (ธงไตรรงค์, 'tricolor'): five horizontal bands of red, white, blue, white, and red, with the blue center stripe at double the height of each of the other four. Designed by King Rama VI (Vajiravudh) and adopted on September 28, 1917, replacing a red flag with a white elephant that had flown since the mid-19th century. September 28 is still observed as Thai National Flag Day.

The colors map to the unofficial national motto nation, religion, king (ชาติ ศาสนา พระมหากษัตริย์). Red stands for the land and the Thai people, white for Theravada Buddhism (the religion of roughly 93% of the population), and blue for the monarchy. Blue was Rama VI's personal color, linked to Saturday, the day of the week on which he was born. A common secondary reading is that the blue was also chosen in 1917 to align visually with the Allies of World War I (France, the UK, the US), who Thailand had just joined on the winning side.

On social, 🇹🇭 is a travel flag, a food flag, and increasingly a soft-power flag. Thailand welcomed 35.32 million foreign visitors in 2024, making it one of the top ten most-visited countries on earth and generating over 1.6 trillion baht. It shows up next to Pad Thai, Tom Yum, Muay Thai, a GMMTV Boys' Love drama still, a baby pygmy hippo, and a White Lotus resort. The Thai government formalized this export push into a policy of 5Fs (food, film, festivals, fighting, fashion) and put Lisa of BLACKPINK at the face of it.

The emoji is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1F9 (T) + U+1F1ED (H). Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. On platforms without flag support, such as older Windows builds, it falls back to the letters 'TH' in a rounded box.

🇹🇭 shows up across five overlapping communities. First, the 35M-visitor tourist bloc: backpackers, honeymooners, digital nomads, and luxury travelers posting beach sunsets, temple hopping, elephant sanctuaries, and street-food crawls. Flight and hotel volume concentrates between November and February (the cool-dry season) and peaks again around Songkran (April 13 to 15).

Second, the Thai diaspora. There are roughly 320,000 Thai Americans (2020 Census, tenth-largest Asian American group), with the heaviest concentration in the Los Angeles area, home to about 25,000 Thai residents and the world's first officially designated Thai Town (a six-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard recognized in 1999). Other significant populations sit in New York, the Bay Area, and across Southeast Asian neighborhoods of Sydney and London.

Third, the BL-drama fandom. Thailand's Boys' Love industry, led by GMMTV, has become the country's most powerful youth-facing cultural export, with its actors and studios accounting for 438 million combined social followers. Chinese, Filipino, Indonesian, Japanese, Brazilian, and Mexican fans post 🇹🇭 alongside ship names (BrightWin, MileApo, OffGun) during series drops and fan meets.

Fourth, the sports bloc: Muay Thai gyms worldwide, Thai national football during Southeast Asian championships, and the global jersey-wearing UFC fandom around Thai strikers.

Fifth, pop-culture tentpoles. BLACKPINK's Lisa (born Lalisa Manobal in Buriram) is the single most-followed Thai person alive and carries 🇹🇭 into every K-pop comeback, Coachella stage, and The White Lotus episode she appears in. The September 2024 Moo Deng explosion, the baby pygmy hippo at Khao Kheow Open Zoo whose name means 'bouncy pork' and who doubled the zoo's daily attendance, was the single biggest non-news Thailand meme moment of the decade.

• 🏯
  Capital: Bangkok / Krung Thep (13.76°N, 100.50°E)
• 👥
  Population: ~71.7 million (2025)
• 🗺️
  Area: 513,120 km²
• 💴
  Currency: Thai baht (THB, ฿)
• 🗣️
  Languages: Thai (official). Isan, Lanna, Southern Thai, Malay regional.
• 📞
  Calling code: +66
• ⏰
  Time zone: ICT (UTC+7), no DST
• 🌐
  Internet TLD: .th

Foods that travel with 🇹🇭

Landmarks that anchor travel content

Thailand's flag story starts with an embarrassed king and a flag flown upside down. Until 1917, Siam (the country didn't adopt 'Thailand' until 1939) flew a red flag with a white elephant at the center, a design dating back to the mid-19th century. During a 1916 tour of Uthai Thani during floods, King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) saw villagers fly the elephant flag upside down, a symbolically awful moment that was hard to even notice with an asymmetric design. He resolved to design something vertically symmetrical.

His first attempt was a five-stripe red-and-white flag, adopted in 1916. The following year, with Siam joining the Allies in World War I, Rama VI replaced the middle red stripe with a dark blue one. Two stories explain the color choice. The first is personal: blue was the auspicious color of Saturday, the day Rama VI was born on (January 1, 1881). The second is diplomatic: the three-color red-white-blue palette matched the flags of France, Britain, and the United States, Siam's new wartime allies. Both stories are true in the sense that contemporaries cited both.

The flag was inaugurated on September 28, 1917, and has flown unchanged since, surviving the 1932 constitutional revolution, the 1939 renaming to Thailand, the Japanese occupation, the Cold War, and over a dozen attempted and successful coups. September 28 became National Flag Day in 2016 under Rama X.

The unofficial mnemonic nation, religion, king was formalized by Rama VI himself, who wrote that each color carried 'a sacred meaning'. That motto still appears on Thai identity documents, school walls, and at the start of every public broadcast at 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., when the national anthem plays and the entire country, including drivers stopped at intersections, is expected to stand still.

1. 1855White elephant on red field: first standardized Siamese national flag under Rama IV
2. 1916Rama VI sees elephant flag flown upside down, orders vertically symmetric redesign
3. 1916First five-stripe red-and-white flag adopted
4. 1917Middle red stripe replaced with dark blue, current tricolor adopted September 28↗
5. 1939Siam officially renamed Thailand; flag unchanged
6. 2015🇹🇭 added to Emoji 1.0 via regional indicator sequences
7. 2016Rama X formally designates September 28 as Thai National Flag Day
8. 2024UNESCO inscribes Songkran as Intangible Cultural Heritage, 🇹🇭 spikes globally↗

Inside Thailand, the flag carries heavy formal weight. The national anthem plays twice a day nationwide at 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. (broadcast on every channel, in every train station, in most public spaces), and everyone within earshot is expected to stand still. The flag is raised at dawn and lowered at dusk at government buildings, schools, and army bases. Thailand has a strict lèse-majesté law (Article 112), and while the flag itself is not the monarchy, proximity to royalty in public imagery makes Thai users careful about how they pair 🇹🇭 with royal portraits, particularly on the birthdays of Rama X (July 28) and Queen Mother Sirikit (August 12, also Mother's Day).

For the Thai diaspora, the flag is a looser thing: a pin on a Muay Thai fighter's shorts in Las Vegas, a decal on a Thai Town bakery window in Hollywood, a default profile border on Twitter for Songkran week. LA's Thai Town, the only officially designated Thai ethnic enclave in the world, runs a huge Songkran block party every April on Hollywood Boulevard.

For outsiders, the flag is most often a tourist object: a bucket-list pin on a trip map, a Songkran post from a backpacker hostel, a caption on a temple photo. Thailand does not punish or resent outsider uses of the flag in travel contexts, but pairing 🇹🇭 with the three-finger salute emoji (which became the symbol of the 2020 to 2021 pro-democracy protests)) or with monarchy-critical content carries real legal risk inside Thailand itself, even for foreigners in transit.

• 💦
  April 13 to 15: Songkran: Thai New Year. Water festival, the biggest annual 🇹🇭 spike.
• 👑
  May 5: Coronation Day: Commemorates Rama X's 2019 coronation. Royal flag-change day.
• 🎂
  July 28: King's Birthday: Rama X. Yellow shirts, bunting in every village. Peak formal 🇹🇭 window.
• 🌸
  August 12: Mother's Day / Queen Mother's Birthday: Queen Sirikit. Blue shirts, carnation giving.
• 🇹🇭
  September 28: National Flag Day: Anniversary of the 1917 tricolor. Flag-raising ceremonies nationwide.
• 🪔
  November 24, 2026: Loy Krathong: Floating-basket festival on the full moon of the twelfth lunar month. Chiang Mai's Yi Peng lantern release is the most-photographed version.
• 🎂
  December 5: Father's Day / National Day: Late Rama IX's birthday. The quieter but deeply emotional royal day.

• •Thailand's flag was designed in 1917 partly because King Rama VI saw villagers flying the old elephant flag upside down during a flood tour, and he resolved to make a version that was vertically symmetric so it couldn't happen again.
• •The blue center stripe exists partly because blue was Rama VI's personal color (Saturday, his birth day) and partly to echo the red-white-blue of the Allied flags Thailand joined in World War I.
• •Thailand has never been formally colonized. It was the only Southeast Asian country to stay sovereign through the entire 19th-century colonial era, a fact so central to national identity it gets taught in every primary-school civics class.
• •Thailand and Costa Rica have effectively the same flag with inverted colors. Costa Rica adopted its version in 1906; Thailand in 1917. Neither knew about the other.
• •Thailand's national anthem plays on every TV and radio channel at 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. daily, and pedestrians in public spaces are expected to stop walking.
• •Thai is the official name since 1939; before that the country was Siam. The two words describe different things. Siam is the geography, Thai is the majority ethnic group.
• •Los Angeles has the world's first and only officially designated Thai Town, a six-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard recognized by the city in 1999.
• •Massaman curry has repeatedly topped CNN's list of the world's best foods (2011, 2020, 2021), a fact every Bangkok taxi driver will tell you unprompted.

• •The White Lotus Season 3 (HBO, 2025): Set at Four Seasons Koh Samui and shot across Bangkok, Phuket, and Samui. Cast includes Lisa of BLACKPINK in her acting debut as a resort health mentor. Sparked an 88% YoY surge in Koh Samui search interest.
• •Lisa (BLACKPINK, solo): Thai-born Lalisa Manobal from Buriram, the most-followed Thai person alive. Her solo single 'LALISA' (2021) featured Thai traditional costume and scored her the Thai Ministry of Culture's Wattanakunathorn honorary award in 2023.
• •The Hangover Part II (2011): Bangkok becomes a character. Responsible for a generation of Phuket stag weekends and, less charitably, decades of Khaosan Road stereotypes.
• •Bad Buddy, 2gether the Series, KinnPorsche, My School President (GMMTV, 2020 to 2024): the GMMTV Boys' Love canon that made Thai BL a global export. KinnPorsche alone trended in over 40 countries during its 2022 run.
• •Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations: Thailand (2008): Bourdain at a Bangkok street-food stall set the template for travel-food TV and drove two decades of 'you have to go to Thailand' pilgrimages.

• •🇹🇭 is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1F9 (T) + U+1F1ED (H). Platforms without flag support show it as 'TH' in a rounded rectangle.
• •Thailand's ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code is TH. Do not confuse with TL (Timor-Leste) or TW (Taiwan).
• •Thai text uses the Thai script, which has no spaces between words. When rendering Thai-language labels near 🇹🇭, make sure your font supports the Thai block (U+0E00 to U+0E7F) and that your line-breaking logic is not splitting on whitespace.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.