Flag of Samoa

What the flag means

• 🔴Red field — courage
• 🔵Blue canton — freedom
• ⭐White Southern Cross — its location in the South Pacific

Design set by: ⁨Official Flag and National Anthem of Samoa Act 1994 (1994 No. 10), s 3 and Schedule⁩ · Adopted 1949

Highlights

• 🏝️ Blue Polynesian islands
• 💦 Magical To Sua ocean trench
• 🌴 Palm-lined white sand beaches
• 💃 Lively fiafia dance nights
• 🌺 Warm fa'a Samoa culture

Quick facts

Region

Oceania · Polynesia

Status

Sovereign state

Population

219,306 people (2025)

Area

2,842 km²

Capital

Apia

Languages

Samoan, English

Currency

Samoan tālā (WST)

Organizations

United Nations

Symbols in History (1)

Coats of arms and emblems whose historic seat lies within this country’s present-day territory.

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  Flag of the Kingdom of Samoa

  Samoa, Polynesia · Flag

  OriginIn the late nineteenth century the Samoan kingdom flew red-and-white flags of its own, and this cross-and-star pattern belongs to the government of Malietoa Laupepa, who held the kingship through most of the years between 1873 and 1898. Those decades were shaped by rival chiefly families contesting the throne and by the growing weight of Germany, Britain and the United States, whose partition of the islands in 1899 brought the kingship to an end. The version shown here is a modern redrawing of that flag.

  DescriptionA plain red field is crossed by one white band running side to side and another running top to bottom, meeting exactly at the centre so that the flag is cut into four red panels of the same size, each wider than it is tall. The two bands are the same width, so the cross is symmetrical rather than shifted towards the flagpole as on Nordic flags. At the centre of the upper panel nearest the pole stands a single white five-pointed star, one point upward, reaching almost the full height of that panel while taking up about half its width. Red with white stayed with Samoa afterwards: the national flag today is red, with a blue rectangle in the upper hoist carrying the white stars of the Southern Cross.

  Image source: Wikimedia Commons — Flag of the Kingdom of Samoa (1873–1886, 1889–1900).svg