Census 2010

Already four years after the 2010 population and housing census was done in Thailand, finally the results got published by the National Statistics Office. However this announcement is really well hidden on the website of the NSO, their special website for the census did not see any update since 2010, and of course there the page which should give access to the data is still under construction. Thus unlike the 2000 census, there are no free PDF reports or Excel sheets available (yet?), only the printed books for each province and CD-ROM for each province, and those of course not for free.

But funnily the Google web crawler can be very helpful if a webmaster allows it crawl everything - when I was searching for the total population number of one province found in this census, Google returned me the PDF with the final report of that province, containing all the data - probably exactly the same as the printed book. For example for Nakhon Si Thammarat, the final report can be found here. That page seems to be something like a FTP access to the webserver itself, and within that folder one can find the final reports for the 2010 census for all provinces, and the preliminary reports for most province.

I am sure that it wasn't intended to make these PDFs available this way, but at least I now have all the census data in the same accuracy as I have for the 2000 census, just need to work a bit more to extract the numbers from the PDFs than I would have to do with XLS files. I don't know if the links above will continue to work long, if the webmaster ever notices that this is probably a big backdoor also useable to drop spam or malware on that server. Or if (and when) the 2010 data will still get published in the same way as the 2000 data, with XLS and PDFs easily found from the website.

DOPA entity numbers 2013

Though it was already published in April, I didn't noticed the annual list of numbers of the administrative entities until few weeks ago. This latest list as of December 31st 2012 states the following numbers.

• Provinces (Changwat, จังหวัด): 76
• Districts (Amphoe, อำเภอ): 878
• Subdistricts (Tambon, ตำบล): 7255 (though I believe the correct number is 7256)
• Villages (Muban, หมู่บ้าน): 74,963
• Provincial administrative organizations (PAO, อบจ): 76
• Municipalities (Thesaban, เทศบาล): 2266
  • Cities (Thesaban Nakhon, เทศบาลนคร): 29
  • Towns (Thesaban Mueang, เทศบาลเมือง): 167
  • Subdistrict municipalities (Thesaban Tambon, เทศบาลตำบล): 2070
• Subdistrict administrative organizations (TAO, อบต): 5509
• Special administrative units (องค์กรปกครองส่วนท้องถิ่นรูปแบบพิเศษ): 2

Compared with the data from 2012, there is of course no change in the central administrative units except seven newly created administrative villages (all where published in the Royal Gazette: one in Chumphon, three in Tak, two in Lampang and one in Yala). The number of municipalities increased a lot again by 184, and will do so in this year as well, so I will skip to check those numbers with my data for now and wait till the list of upgrades for this year is complete.

License plate designs for Satun, Loei and Kamphaeng Phet

End of last year, four license plate graphic designs were announced in the Royal Gazette, however I only showed Bueng Kan in detail then and promised to post about the other later. Well, being busy with other things, this slipped through until I was now asked by email for two of these three.

• Satun [Gazette]: Since the province is located at the Andaman sea, the graphic shows a beach scene. The rocks in the lower left look like they refer to Hin Ngam island, but for the other two rock structures I am not sure if they refer to a real place or are just an artists impression. However strangely this graphic is identical with the design already announced in 2008, so I don't understand why there was a new announcement.
• Loei [Gazette]: The design is a variation of the 2007 design [Gazette], still showing the Phu Kradueng hill with its plateau on top, a pine tree in front of the Lom Sak cliff also within Phu Kradueng National Park, and three acorn leaves - which however now look quite different from the ones in 2007. A new element added this time is the Phi Ta Khon mask.
• Kamphaeng Phet [Gazette]: The design for kamphaeng Phet changes a lot compared with the 2006 design [Gazette], the only element present in both designs are the banana trees. Newly added is a rice plant to the right, a waterfall in the background - probably Khlong Lan waterfall. Most prominently is the city wall, obviously referring to the name of the province which translates to "Diamond Wall".