Remembering the roots.

In about an hour, Malaysia would turn 51.

It’s time we cher­ish the moment, put aside all our dif­fer­ences, our insuf­fi­cien­cies, our beliefs, and cel­e­brate what we all have in com­mon — being proud cit­i­zens of Malaysia.

This year, tehCpeng.net would be pay­ing trib­ute to Mohamad Hamzah, an archi­tect, who 61 years ago, designed Malaysia’s national flag. I guess nobody would be more proud to have his own design paraded all over the coun­try 24/7 for 51 whole years.

It’s every designer’s wet dream I tell you.

Flag atop Sultan Iskandar building

Like this humon­gous one erected only once a year every Merdeka month atop the Sul­tan Iskan­dar Building.

To com­mem­o­rate his achieve­ment, I tried to repli­cate how would his sketch look like as he made a pro­posal for a flag design com­pe­ti­tion held in 1947. Okay — he might not have used Eng­lish in his sketches, and the Jalur Gemi­lang isn’t known as the Jalur Gemi­lang until 1997.

Also, Mohamad Hamzah first designed his flag to have a five-pointed star instead of the 14-pointed one on the flags we see fly­ing today.

merdeka flag sketch

So for today’s sake, let’s just assume he did all that on his sketches.

Happy 51st Birth­day Malaysia!

9 thoughts on “Remembering the roots.

  1. His­tory Teacher

    To those who ques­tion or said it was copied from the US flag. Please take note. It was not copied from the US flag.… It was based on the British East India Com­pany flag which was once active in Malaya… and BEIC existed long before the US was formed and gained inde­pen­dence… There­fore one could also say that the US copied their flag from the BEIC flag.… So now who copied from who???
    Refer to these links…
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Malaysia
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

    The sim­i­lar­ity to US flag or the fact why Tunku chose the design is because Tunku was very anti com­mu­nist and strongly sup­ported the pro West­ern Bloc which was led by USA. There­fore he nat­u­rally chose the design to show to the world Malaya’s polit­i­cal stand and sup­port at that time… And the cho­sen flag was endorsed by King George VI… so what’s the prob­lem now after so many years it was accepted by all (inter­nally and inter­na­tion­ally).… Haiz.….

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