Emblem of TAO San Pu Loei, Doi Saket, Chiang Mai

By same random googleing I came across the website of the subdistrict municipality San Pu Loei (เทศบาลตําบลสันปูเลย) in Doi Saket district, Chiang Mai. While the website has nothing special - only a small part is available in English, but at least it has an English section, normally the websites of the municipalities or TAO are exclusively in Thai.

But what caught my attention was the emblem of the municipality, which unlike most municipal emblems does not show a geographic or historic speciality of the town, but a rather simple graphic. As it is such a simple design, I played with inkscape a bit and made it into a vector graphic, and it came quite close to the one seen on the website.

The emblem shows two hands holding a circle with the three letters อ (Oh Ang), บ (Bo Baimai) and ต (To Tao) - the Thai abbreviation O.Bo.To. which stands for องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล (Ong Kan Borihan Suan Tambon), in English called Tambon (Subdistrict) Administrative Organization (TAO or SAO). The text in the top arc is องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลสันปูเลย - TAO San Pu Loei, and in the bottom arc the name of district and province. Though most won't notice, similar calligraphic Thai letters are very commonly seen in Thailand - several of the Royal emblems have the letters Pho Po Ro in middle, the initials of HM the King.

But the work to redraw that emblem was rather in vain, because the TAO has already been upgraded to a subdistrict municipality this summer, and therefore they need to create a new emblem - not only the text in the upper half has to change, but the three letters in the middle have to change. That won't be that easy, as there's no common abbreviation for thesaban tambon (subdistrict municipality), though I rarely have seen ต.ต. used for it. So at least for the center of the emblem they have to come up with a completely new design.