Cancelled new provinces - Hua Hin

In August 2006 the Thai government suddenly came out with the idea of creating a new province around the popular sea bath Hua Hin, to be created for HM King Bhumiphol's 80th birthday one year later. Also the name of this new province was to be decided by the king himself. Thanks to the online archive of The Nation, the original newspaper article from that time is still available.

This new province was set to contain (from the north to the south, see the map above) the district Cha-Am from Phetchaburi province, and the three northern districts of Prachuap Khiri Khan province - Hua Hin, Pran Buri and Sam Roi Yot. Especially Hua Hin, but to a lesser degree also Cha-Am (see photo) have huge income from the tourist centers there, so cutting these out of their previous provinces would remove a lot of the income from them. Also, a province with such a lot of income would be popular post for cronies. Other criticism I have heard was this proposal was an attempt of gerrymandering, or to calm down the King's anger on Thaksin's style of government. The related thread in the 2bangkok forum is full of such criticism. One of the few pro's for a new province - the large size of Prachuap Khiri Khan - was alleviated by the fact a branch province hall in the north of the province already exists.

But as this proposal was made shortly before the coup which ousted Thaksin from office - he just returned from the 17 months of exile now - the new government controlled by the military apparently shelved the proposal, as I haven't heard anything about it anymore since then. But it's of course also possible I just missed the announcement of the scrapping of this plan. Besides - the 80th birthday of the King is over already, so now it would be too late for this birthday gift anyway.

While the creation of a whole province in honor of the King would have been something new, districts were created in his name before. In 1996, five districts were created on December 5, the birthday of the king, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his ascension to the throne. All five districts were named Chaloem Phra Kiat (เฉลิมพระเกียรติ), an honorific way of addressing a member of the royal family.

Census 2010 preparations

Thailand will conduct the next national census - including both housing and population - in 2010. The ten year rhythm was adopted in 1970, following the United Nations recommendation to hold the national census in each year ending with zero. This forthcoming census will be the 11th census, earlier ones where done in 1909, 1919, 1927, 1937, 1947, and then since 1960 every 10 years. Also since 1960, the National Statistics Office (NSO, สำนักงานสถิติแห่งชาติ) is responsible to take out the census. Some more background on the forthcoming census compared to the previous ones can be found in a paper by Jirawan Boonperm presented at an ASEAN meeting in 2006.

The results of the 2000 census are available on the NSO website, partially as PDF documents, partially as Excel sheets. Note that even the NSO admits that these data have their problems, especially the population number in Bangkok is in real higher than counted - but in fact the population number by the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA) is even half a million lower than the 6.3 million counted in the 2000 census.

Municipalities created in fiscal year 2547/2548

After I got hinted to a list of municipality creation in last year, Google helped me to find the same for 2005, hidden deep inside thailocaladmin.go.th.

Unlike last year, in 2005 there were much less entries in this list, only 5 thesaban tambon upgraded to thesaban mueang, and 13 TAO upgraded to thesaban tambon. While the upgrades have all been announced in the Royal Gazette already, there were apparently three announcements for the creations, which I already listed earlier as still pending announcement. All there were signed in June 2005, but one from August was published in September. I start to doubt these are really not yet published, and more think they might be simply wrongly indexed in the Gazette database - which would be odd as unlike the historic announcement no-one needs to type the title anymore, everything can be done with copy-and-paste.

Mueang of Sukhothai kingdom

The controversial Ramkhamhaeng stele is the oldest proof of the administrative subdivision of a Tai kingdom, as well as the oldest written text in Thai script. Some scholars doubt the authenticity of this stele however, claiming it was written much later due to linguistic oddities, while others strongly doubt it could be made up in the 19th century as it refers to places rediscovered in the 20th century and long forgotten when the later King Mongkut discovered the stele in 1833. A whole collection of papers on this topic was published by the Siam Society in 1991, however I have only one of the texts within that collection - David K. Wyatt's Studies in Thai History contains the one titled Contextual Arguments for the Authenticity of the Ramkhamhaeng Inscription.

Praising King Ramkhamhaeng (ca. 1239–1317) achievements for his kingdom, it also lists cities (Mueang) and minor kingdoms under the overlordship of Sukhothai in the last part of the fourth side. However this does not mean that these areas were part of a nation-state like the modern-day Thailand, all of these were rather independent kingdoms on their own who just had swear an oath of allegiance to the overlord, pay tribute and help in case of a military conflict.

• East: Sara Luang, Song Khwae, Lam, Bachai, Sakha, Wiang Chan, Wiang Kham
• South: Khonti, Phra Bang, Phraek, Suphanaphum, Ratchaburi, Phetchaburi, Si Thammarat
• West: Chod, … (unreadable) , Hongsawati
• North: Phrae, Man, N… (unreadable), Phlua, Chawa
  

Some of the names are directly identified as they still have the same name today, like Wiang Chan (Vientiane) or (Nakhon) Si Thammarat. Others changed their name, so Song Khwae is the old name of Phitsanulok, or are now better known in a different name, like Hongsawati which is the Mon name of Pegu (Bagan). I think I once saw the above list with all names matched to their modern-day name, but sadly cannot find it anymore.

The whole inscription in both Thai and English together with a little more on the controversy around it can be found in this blog posting, while here there are photos of the original piece.

Interesting new blog

Nopphadon has started a blog named Development Strategy, and as he has written his thesis about Research on the Creation of the Community Development Strategy by Participant Community Planning he is quite familiar with the local administration system in Thailand. His most recent posting was a partial translation of the Tambon Council and Tambon Administration Authority Act - just sad that this act is one of the very few which already have an English translation available on the web. But I am really looking forward to what he will put on his blog next.

My Thailand library

As I was always an avid reader, I started to buy lots of books of Thailand when my interest into this country was started. I quickly finished with the standard books, like David K. Wyatt's Thailand - A short history, so now I often buy some strange topic books when browsing through the bookstores of Bangkok. Especially White Lotus Press has some very odd (but nevertheless interesting) titles in their catalog, like the reprints of historical books.

To give other Wikipedians the chance to use my library, and maybe even get to find a look into book I wasn't able to find, I started to list my most important books on Thai topics on a special page within Wikipedia. I now noticed the website librarything.com where one can do this with a much larger audience. It's limited to 200 books in the free version, which should be well enough to hold all my Thai books for the near future. But maybe I'll upgrade to the full account once they add collections to allow to categorize books beyond the simple tags. Anyway, you can see all those books I added there, or even subscribe to RSS feed to get updates whenever I add a new one. I think I have added all notable already. Of course I will write a review here when I find something new (or antiquarian) fitting to the topic of this blog, not just on this library thing.

Quite a lot of my books there are none of the other member's library, so librarything is not yet the place for me to find interesting new/old books for Thai topics. A really huge bibliography of Thai topics is the Leeds Thai politics bibliography, compile by Dr. Michael Nelson.

Muak Lek district office

Here's another photo of a district office, this time the one of Muak Lek (มวกเหล็ก), in the east of Saraburi Province at the boundary to Nakhon Ratchasima. It is the same building I have chosen for the title bar of the blog, since it's both in the standard building style of district offices, and I simply like the photo - normally it always has cars parking in front of such buildings. According to a WinWord document from the website of Saraburi province, this office was opened on May 7 1970. There is nothing special about this building, except maybe the flower pots apparently sponsored by Siam City Cement company. Several cement plants are located in the district, including of course one from Siam Cement.



It was quite a coincidence that I could take that photo. We were on the way from one Vin de Ray (แวงเดอร์เรย์) winery to the Rabiang Ruea (ระเบียงเรือ) resort near Khao Yai National Park, and took one wrong turn which got us into the town Muak Lek itself. I got the chance to jump out of car for a quick photo, and then had to guide how to get back to Mittraphap highway - with a little luck I succeeded to do so even without having a map at hand.

Gazette announcements and their date of being effective

Announcements in the Royal Gazette have at least two dates - the date when it was published in the Gazette (วันที่ประกาศ), and the date it was approved and signed and thus deemed ready for publication. Sometimes the publication follows few days after the approval, sometimes a whole year expires between the two dates. Some announcements carry a third date, the one when the announcement gets effective, usually with the last sentence of the announcement being something like ทั้งนี้ ตั้งแต่วันที่ ... เป็นต้นไป.

But what about those announcements which lack this date - are they effective with the date of approval, or the date of publication? Or can they be effective at a date not mentioned in the announcement at all? For the recent municipality creations the file I just got contains a column named วันที่มีผลใช้บังคับ (date effective), which is apparently identical with the approval date in the announcement.

The upgrades of minor districts to full districts never include the effective date. See for example the upgrade in 1997 - the announcement was published on September 26, it was signed September 15, but amphoe.com for several of the districts claims these were updated on October 11: ต่อมาได้รับการยกฐานขึ้นเป็นอำเภอหนองปรือ ตั้งแต่วันที่ 11 ตุลาคม 2540 เป็นต้นมา (from here). I simply wonder how comes this date is not mentioned in the announcement, and if it is real how to find this date for all those announcements where it wasn't stated.

Municipalities created in fiscal year 2549/2550

The webmaster of kontessaban.com provided me with a link to a PDF with all the municipality (thesaban) creations which happened in the fiscal year 2549/2550, i.e. between October 1 2006 and September 30 2007. It also includes the up-to-date numbers of municipalities and TAO for each province, with the total numbers being the same as in the document published by DOPA. Also quite helpful - that document contains the dates when the creations (or upgrades, which are also listed) have been effective. So there was a big number of TAO upgraded to municipalities in September last year, which all have yet to be published in the Gazette.

The other documents linked on the webpage include Excel sheets with all the municipalities and TAO, for the TAO including the year it was established. This municipality list already helped me to find one entry in my list where I missed a rename, but there is still one oddity - the Excel sheet contains 1161 entities, at the end of 2007 it there should be 1276, but the above PDF contains 117 new, so there are two too many. Or maybe even three, as Phan Sao (พันเสา) in Phitsanulok was created on October 31 already within the new fiscal year, but the DOPA year-end statistic explicitly says December, but I guess they meant the fiscal year. So it seems two were already merged into another municipalities, but which? Just hope the Gazette will catch up soon with the announcements.

No regional autonomy for now

As already foreseen earlier, the idea of a special administrative area for the three southern provinces has now been withdrawn.

Interior Minister Pol.Capt.Chalerm Yubamroong (เฉลิม อยู่บำรุง) says the establishment of the three Southern border provinces as special governing zone has been withdrawn.

Mr Chalerm says the ministry has given up on the special governing zone project due to objections by many people who are concerned that the project may lead to conflicts in the society.

Parishes of Surat Thani diocese

It might be because of my one detour posting about the ecclesiastic subdivision of Thailand, but checking through the search strings which lead readers here there are quite a lot looking for information about churches in Thailand. While there are several websites in Thai about catholic topics, almost none are bilingual, so I will do little bit more on the church subdivisions in Thailand here from time to time trying to fill that gap a little bit.

The diocese of Surat Thani (สังฆมณฑลสุราษฎร์ธานี) was established in 1969, when it was split off from the diocese of Ratchaburi. It covers all the southern provinces, extending up to Phrachuap Khiri Khan in the north, including the town Hua Hin. As the name suggests, its administration and cathedral (see photo) is located in the town Surat Thani.

The diocese is subdivided into 4 areas (เขต) - not sure if these are actually deaneries or just an informal grouping. The diocese website then lists 41 churches within these four areas. Catholic Hierarchy says there are 39 parishes in 2004, which fits with the church list, as two of the churches are named วัดน้อย (chapel) and thus aren't parish churches.

As listing 41 churches would make the posting a bit lengthy, I only list those in the bigger towns, especially the touristic areas, but leave the complete list to be published as a XML, which I will also fill with the other dioceses later. Right now that file is not much more than the church list linked above rewritten in XML, but it will get expanded with time.

• Upper area (เขตภาคใต้ตอนบน) - 11 parishes
  • St. Theresa (วัดนักบุญเทเรซา), Hua Hin
• Central area (เขตภาคใต้ตอนกลาง) - 7 parishes, 1 chapel
  • St. Raphael (อาสนวิหารอัครเทวดาราฟาเอล), Surat Thani, the cathedral of the diocese
  • St. Anna (วัดนักบุญอันนา), Nathon, and a Chapel (วัดน้อยประจำสถานรับเลี้ยงเด็กมารีย์อุปถัมภ์, don't know how to translate it correctly, something about Mary nursery), Bophut, both on Ko Samui
• Lower area (เขตภาคใต้ตอนล่าง) - 12 parishes
  • Our Lady of Lourdes (วัดแม่พระประจักษ์เมืองลูร์), Hat Yai
• Andaman area (เขตอันดามัน) - 9 parishes, 1 chapel
  • St. Agnes (วัดนักบุญอักแนส), Ao Nang, Krabi
  • Our Lady of the Assumption (วัดพระหฤทัยพระเยซูเจ้า), Phuket city, and the Sacret Heart Chapel (วัดน้อยพระหฤทัยศักดิ์สิทธิ์) in Patong

In this Google Map I have marked as many churches of this diocese as I could find the location of, additions or corrections are welcome. Same as the XML, this map will get updated with time.
View Larger Map

Thai standard 1099-2535

Just found on Bact's blog a link to the Thai national standard TIS 1099-2535, which defines the two-digit geocodes for the provinces. This standard, published in 1992, is in fact identical with ISO 3166-2 (except that the ISO added a special code for Pattaya). This also explains why the ISO codes for the provinces did change between the draft standard of 1988 (which was based on the US created FIPS 10-4) and the final published one of 1998. I wish I could read the text on that website, it might give me even more insight on the origin of this standard.

There is also a more condense page which only lists the codes. The standard was also published in the Royal Gazette, in volume 109, issue 104 ง, page 9011, published on August 20 1992. That PDF also includes the 8 pages of the standard itself.

Regional autonomy for the deep south?

The Nation just had a report on the idea of new Interior Minister Chalerm Yoobamrung to deal with the ongoing insurgency in the three Muslim provinces Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala by establishing a special administrative area (เขตปกครองพิเศษ).

Earlier the day, Chalerm said support for the establishment of a special administrative zone..

He said all government agencies concerned would have to help him study which should be the best model of special administrative zone for Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat.

The zone could be modelled after China or Germany, he said.

I know of the special administrative areas in China, but these are for the economic boom areas only, and in Germany there's definitely no special administrative area. In Germany, all of the provinces (Bundesländer) have quite a lot of autonomy with an elected parliament, quite contrary to the Thai provinces which are just units of the central administration. Decentralization in Thailand is often talked about, but things like elected provincial governors never got implemented.

As in this short new report there are no details about what Chalerm means with his special zone, and also as prime minister Samak already called him not to rush with it, it will probably take quite some more time till a more concrete plan comes into public. But as the military could not solve this problem since it erupted in 2004, a new approach is IMHO a good idea.

A similar approach was already discussed last year in the 2bangkok forum, where Khun Wisarut suggested the recreation of the Monthon (circle, มณฑล) Pattani. This circle was established in 1906 and covered the area of the three provinces, at that time still divided into seven Mueang. It was abolished in 1932 and included into the Nakhon Si Thammarat circle, and one year later the circles were abolished altogether.

Many new municipalities?

It seems municipality creations become an recurring topic now. While looking for more information about the municipality Takut in Mueang Saraburi district, which I found to be pending announcement, one of the few hits was at kontessaban.com. There it has a complete list of all current municipalities, altogether 1277 entities. This is confirmed by the DOPAs annual statistic, where the number of municipalities is listed as 1276. In my spreadsheet I only have 1182, which means there are 95 I haven't found yet either in the Royal Gazette or the DOPA population data till 2006, so including the ones listed above it means more than 100 municipalities not yet announced. I wrote a parser for the kontessaban list, which reduced the entries to look at to 150. After eliminating those which were not automatically identified because of misspellings, I added those I cannot find in my spreadsheet yet. But it seems that list is also not without mistakes, as a few of municipalities in my list are missing there, as well as a few number in that list omitted and duplicated.

The new municipalities are not equally distributed on the country - the province Chonburi with 10 and Chiang Mai with 8 top the list. A few strange ones are between them as well - instead of extending the existing municipalities Nam Phong (Khon Kaen) or Bang Chan (Rayong), there are now new municipalities named Lam Nam Phong and Bang Chan (sic!) covering the remaining parts of the subdistrict additionally to the previous municipalities. Having two municipalities with the same name in the same subdistrict and only a different status will create quite some confusion, including create problems for my parsers.

The 2007 population statistics of DOPA only included a few of those new ones however. And as that lists is so far the only way to to guess the geocodes for them, I now have to wait one more year or a new source has to show up to get the geocodes. But of course the preliminary results as of now are incorporated in my spreadsheet already.

Wikipedia and TAT

Back in February 2003, I started to create articles on the provinces of Thailand, beginning with Surat Thani. I soon realized that it'll be a lot of work to collect good information for all the 75 articles, I set up a WikiProject, hoping to get other Wikipedians join in the effort. However it stayed to be mainly a one-man project, so it took till end of 2003 to have at least a short article for each province. And quite a lot articles basically are the same still then, only improved gradually since then. Especially those of the less-visited Isan provinces are really quite short, as there were only few online or offline sources about it available to me. But they are still much better than the incredible number of one-sentence articles called "stub" for similar entities of other less-popular countries than Thailand. Now the Tourist Authority of Thailand discovered the unhappy state of these articles and decided to help out.

Their press release stating that (among other things) they want to improve the article on Wikipedia and Wikitravel (which are even more in need of good contents) does not go much into detail about their plans yet.

WIKI Mission for Thailand Tourism Project

To edit and improve information about Thai tourism on www.wikipedia.org
and www.WIKITravel.org to ensure it is accurate and up-to-date. Students and faculty members at Chulalongkorn University and Rangsit University will be responsible for editing and improving the English version of these online encyclopedias.

This brevity caused some sarcastic or worried comments - the Bangkok Post at least in their online version called TAT the "Corrections Authority". Also both Bangkok Pundit and FACT are quite worried that this would mean that any criticism in the articles will be deleted, and they'll abuse Wikipedia to do propaganda for Thailand. To add to the confusion, apparently a school or university teacher in Thailand just started their class to edit Wikipedia, as some province articles received loads of edits of text which sounds like from a tourism brochure, and all my attempts to contact with any of these editors failed so far. Given that press release and these edits came at the same time, I thought it was TAT who already started and are on the direct way into a public relations disaster. I've then sent a rather worried email to them, especially as I have so far only read quite negative comments on TAT, e.g. Richard Barrow complains about TAT not being any cooperative.

But in fact it turned out that TAT has nothing to do with these edits, but in fact they just started their WikiMission and are still in the planning phase, a big press conference on it is planned for later this year. They invited any interested Wikipedia to join in their planning, and as their main target are the above mentioned province article I of course offered my help. If done properly, then this WikiMission could become something fruitful for both Wikipedia and TAT. Especially having some of the high-quality photos which TAT has in their stock under a free license would help greatly, there are still many of the less-visited provinces having no photos at all on Wikipedia Commons. Let's see what will happen.

Population statistics as of December 2007

The Department of provincial administration (DOPA) has just put the population statistics for the year 2007 on their website. The table I use most is the data down to for each single subdistrict, with the municipal areas listed separately.

The data add some new municipalities (thesaban) I did not had in my spreadsheet yet, but by far not all to come to the official number of 1,276 as listed in the global data PDF. Most of the newly listed municipalities have not yet been announced in the Royal Gazette - but there are also a few which have been announced already but still are not in population statistics, for example Kut Nok Plao in Saraburi. Below is the list of all new municipalities I find with these population statistics:

• Prasat Thong, Chiang Rak Noi, Bang Krasan, Bang Nom Kho and Sam Ko, Ayutthaya
  
• Khlong Lan Phatthana and Thep Nakhon, Kamphaeng Phet
• Sawathi, Khon Kaen
• Di Lang, Tha Sala and Khao Sam Yot, Lopburi
  
• Lam Nang Kaeo, Nakhon Ratchasima
  
• Thong Nian and Thi Wang, Nakhon Si Thammarat
• Hat Kham and Pho Chai, Nong Khai
  
• Tha Wang Thong, Phayao
• Noen Pho, Phichit
• Ban Yaeng, Sai Yoi and Phan Sao, Phitsanulok
• Ratsada, Rawai and Wichit, Phuket
• Chang Sai, Surat Thani
• Mai Ngam, Tak
• Kham Yai, Ubon Ratchathani
• Pa Kho, Udon Thani
  
• Pha Chuk, Uttaradit

There are also two municipalities which were renamed.

• In Nan, Lae was renamed to Thung Chang
• In Songkhla, Phang La was renamed to Khlong Ngae

Another odd thing - in the above mentioned PDF the population number is quoted as 62,828,706 as of December 2007, while these population statistics give 63,038,247 as of December 2007. Apparently there are different ways of counting involved.

Current number of administrative entities

I just found a small PDF at the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA) which lists the numbers for each of the administrative entities, both the central and the local administration as of December 2007. The original PDF can be downloaded here.

• Central administration
  
  • Provinces (changwat, จังหวัด): 75
  • Districts (amphoe, อำเภอ): 877
  • Subdistricts (tambon, ตำบล): 7,255
  • Villages (muban, หมู่บ้าน): 74,944
• Local Administration
  
  • Provincial administration organizations (PAO, องค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัด): 75
    
  • Cities (thesaban nakhon, เทศบาลนคร): 23
  • Towns (thesaban mueang, เทศบาลเมือง): 129
  • Subdistrict municipalities (thesaban tambon, เทศบาลตำบล): 1,124
  • Subdistrict (Tambon) administration organizations (TAO or SAO, องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล): 6,500
• Special administrative entities: 2 (Bangkok and Pattaya)

And as of December 15 2007 the country has a population of 62,828,706 - 31,007,857 men and 31,820,849 women.

San Sai municipality enlarged

Published in the Royal Gazette yesterday, the subdistrict municipality (thesaban tambon) San Sai (เทศบาลตำบลสันทราย) in Mae Chan district of Chiang Rai province was enlarged.

The announcement was made in volume 125, issue พิเศษ 24 ง, page 17, published February 4 2008. It was approved on December 21 2007. As the announcement does not state any date for it to become effective, I guess it will get effective with the announcement. The PDF of the announcement also includes the an appendix with the description of the new municipality boundary, as well as a map showing its extend - it just lacks to state the total area in square kilometers (or rai). If comparing with the map from the creation of the sanitary district San Sai back in 1965 it's easy to see that it was significantly enlarged to the south and east.

CEO governors

One of the policies of Thaksin Shinawatras government was the introduction of CEO governors, as a way to modernize and decentralize provincial government. Like most of the Thaksins programs it was scrapped after the coup, but now the reincarnation of TRT is leading the new government it will get revived. Bangkok Post reports

"We have completed drafting the new government's policies and up to 90 per cent are those that were scrapped after Mr Thaksin's forced departure," said Mr Noppadon. "Some of these include the Small Medium Large village fund scheme (SML), the government (two- and three-digit) lottery and the CEO governer scheme."

What is the CEO governors about, additionally to a modern sounding name. The traditional administration of the provinces consists of officers sent from the various ministries, who each report directly back to their superior in Bangkok. The governor, appointed by the ministry of Interior, had only very few administrative powers, but has mostly ceremonial tasks. The CEO governor on the other hand were given much more administrative powers. It became their task to plan the development in their province, and even were allowed to issue bonds to get additional funding for their projects. The CEO governor system was introduced in 2001 in some pilot provinces, and came into effect on all provinces in 2003.

I wonder if the new government will also revive the plans for the "Airport City" Nakhon Suvarnabhumi, which was finally shelved after the coup.

New municipalities not yet announced?

In my 2007 digest I mentioned a WinWord file about the creation of 10 subdistrict municipalities (thesaban tambon). At that time I suspected those to be a draft of a forthcoming announcement in the Royal Gazette. I had previously seen a municipality creation gazetted one year after it was effective, but now I have searched a bit more it seems that file isn't the only one of its kind.

So far I have found the following four further such WinWord files containing upgrades of TAOs to municipalities.

1. 2001: Krap Yai (กรับใหญ่), Wiang Mok (เวียงมอก), Khao Kaeo (เขาแก้ว), Dong Yen (ดงเย็น) and Chong Lom (ช่องลม)
   
2. 2005: Ban Sing (บ้านสิงห์) and Phra Lao (พระเหลา)
3. 2005: Mae Raeng (แม่แรง), Saen Suk (แสนสุข), Huai Pho (ห้วยโพธิ์) and Ta Chong (ตาจง)
4. 2005: Makham Khu (มะขามคู่)
5. and the previously mentioned on from 2007: Tha Chang (ท่าช้าง), Mae Hia (แม่เหียะ), Tha Sala (ท่าศาลา), Saraphi (สารภี), Khlong Khut (คลองขุด), Kut Prathai (กุดประทาย), Nikhom Sang Ton-eng Lam Dom Noi (นิคมสร้างตนเองลำโดมน้อย), Phosa (โพสะ), Wang Sombun (วังสมบูรณ์), Wang Sala (วังศาลา)
   

These municipalities are listed in the population statistics of the Department of Provincial Administration, and I have even seen an Gazette announcement on the change of constituency boundaries at one of these municipality. Either the announcements were issued in the Gazette under a totally different title than normally and I could not find them because of that, or for whatever reason these were not in the Gazette at all.

For one of the recent municipality creation, there's such a DOC file as well dating from 2006 - so it was written down in 2006, became effective in 2007 and was gazetted in 2008. Maybe I just have to wait until I see one of the above posted in the Royal Gazette, then my question will finally be answered. So at least those from 2007 are still to be expected, what happened to those from 2005 or even 2001 I don't know. But it seems to be not totally uncommon to have the official announcement long after the actual creation, for example the Pa Hin Ngam national park was announced in 2007 but created in 1994.