British Columbia District Tartan
This is one variant — a specific cloth: this exact thread count and colourway, with its own provenance below. It is one weaving of the sett (the scale-free proportion — the same cloth at any scale or shade), whose colour order is pattern GKGWGWRKRWRW.
Sourced from house-of-tartan. It is a 12 stripe tartan.
Original link http://www.house-of-tartan.scotland.net/house/TartanViewjs.asp?colr=Def&tnam=808
Provenance
Earliest known date: 1966 The British Columbia Provincial tartan was produced by the Pik Mills of Quebec in connection with the Centennial Celebration of 1966 which marked the unification of the administration of the mainland and Vancouver Island a hundred years earlier.
4 attestations — the source records this cloth was collapsed from (oldest owns this page)
- 1966 — British Columbia District Tartan (house-of-tartan, record)
- 01/01/1967 — British Columbia (register-of-tartans, record)
Adopted as the official tartan in 1974 through the British Columbia Tartan Act. The Scottish ancestry of this most westerly of Canada's provinces is highlighted by an early suggestion that it be called New Caledonia. That was discarded however because the name had already been used in the South Pacific and the name British Columbia was confirmed by official proclamation in 1858. Columbia, after the river of the same name, was the traditional name for the south of the colony. The tartan was designed by Earl K Ward of Victoria in 1967 as part of the 1966-67 centennial celebrations marking the creation of the province as one colony and in 1974 it was officially adopted as the provincial tartan. The Pacific Dogwood is the official flower of the province and is represented by white in the tartan. Green is for the BC forests which cover an area twice as big as all of the New England states and New York State. Blue is for the Pacific Ocean, red is for Canada's national emblem of the maple leaf and gold is for the sun and the crown in the provincial flag. The tartan was recorded in the Lyon Court Books (LCB 18) on 8th January 1969. - 1967 — British Columbia (District) (tartans-authority, record)
Adopted as the official tartan in 1974 through the Provincial Symbols and Honours Act. The Scottish ancestry of this most westerly of Canada's provinces is highlighted by an early suggestion that it be called New Caledonia. That was discarded however because of its pre-existing use in the South Pacific and the name British Columbia was confirmed by official proclamation in 1858. Columbia, after the river of the same name, was the traditional name for the south of the colony. The tartan was designed by Earl K Ward of Victoria in 1967 as part of the 1966-67 centennial celebrations marking the merger of the two colonies of British Columbia and Vancouver Island into a single colony. In 1974 it was officially adopted as the provincial tartan. The Pacific Dogwood is the official flower of the province and is represented by white in the tartan. Green is for the BC forests which cover an area twice as big as all of the New England states and New York State. Blue is for the Pacific Ocean, red is for Canada's national emblem of the maple leaf and gold is for the sun and the crown in the provincial flag. The tartan was entered in the Lyon Court Book No. 18 on the 8th January 1969. - undated — British Columbia (weddslist, record)
Dataset — provenance for this record, inherited from the source manifest
- source
- House of Tartan
- data captured from
- https://github.com/thetartan/tartan-database/blob/master/data/house-of-tartan/data.csv
- data date
- 1966 (this record)
- licence
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Capture chain — the hands this data passed through, oldest first; each capture carries its own licence
- House of Tartan
the weaver/retailer's database — the site is now offline; the URL is kept as the ultimate source's identity - thetartan/tartan-database 2016-2017 · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Levko Kravets's frozen compilation — the capture we vendored, and where its CC licence text came from - this dictionary captured 2026-06-10 · commit 5bf86c7566
each re-capture is a git commit to data/sources
Register references
External register numbers recorded for this tartan.
- Scottish Register of Tartans: 361
- Scottish Tartans Authority (ITI): 808
- Scottish Tartans World Register: 808
Thread count
G/8 K4 G16 LB16 Y4 LB16 R16 K4 R16 LB8 R16 W/4
One full sett is 244 threads.
Palette
| Colour | Shade | OKLCh |
|---|---|---|
| LB | #B5BBDE #B5BBDE | oklch(79.9% 0.050 277.6) |
| G | #008B2A #008B2A | oklch(55.4% 0.170 145.9) |
| K | #000000 #000000 | oklch(0.0% 0.000 0.0) |
| W | #F7F7F7 #F7F7F7 | oklch(97.6% 0.000 89.9) |
| R | #D60020 #D60020 | oklch(55.2% 0.224 25.5) |
| Y | #8B6E00 #8B6E00 | oklch(55.1% 0.113 90.4) |
Sample pattern
Nearest tartan variants
The nearest existing variants by ΔTartan distance, with this cloth at the top so the swatches line up against it.
Neighbour map
Every grey dot is one of 13621 variants placed by the first two principal components of the ΔTartan feature space (42% of its variance). Red is this tartan; blue dots are its nearest — click one to open its page.
ID: /variants/s12/g2k1g4lb4y1lb4r4k1r4lb2r4w1~x4/