Tuesday, November 28, 2017

License plate graphic for Yala province

Yesterday, the background graphic for the license plates in Yala have been announced in the Royal Gazette. This is apparently the first-ever such graphic for Yala since the first such graphics were announced in 2004, at least I never saw any announcement for this province so far. The only other province which has never been assigned such a colorful background is Mae Hong Son, I can only guess that in these two provinces there was not much interest in the bidding for special license codes, as these colorful backgrounds are only available for these special codes as an additional status symbol.

The graphic shows both the hills at the border to Malaysia and the coastal landscape at the Gulf of Thailand. The two bird-cages to the left refer to the local tradition of songbird contests, the man with a blowpipe to the Negrito tribes who were originally living in the borderland to Malaysia. To the right is a postal box from the southernmost town Betong (เบตง). As it has this reference to Betong, I suspect that the graphical license plate is also used for Betong - the only district in Thailand which has its separate license plate and does not use the provincial license plate.

Though still incomplete, a lot of the graphics of the other provinces can be found in my album of the license plate backgrounds, and I also have compiled a spreadsheet showing which provinces have received a license plate in which year - as I guess most reader won't be able to read the full XML data for these announcements.

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