Amphoe Mueang naming scheme

In every province the district (Amphoe, อำเภอ) which contains the province hall is named same as the province, with the word Mueang (เมือง) added - with the exception of Ayutthaya province, where both the province and the district are named Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya (พระนครศรีอยุธยา). And of course Bangkok, which is not a province in the normal sense anyway. On the other hand, there are four districts which have that work in their name without being the capital district.

Now, these weren't the only exceptions, before the provinces Thonburi and Phra Nakhon were merged in 1972, the two capital district had no Mueang in the name either. To find more, one has to go much further into the history of this naming scheme. It was in fact adopted in 1938, with an announcement in the Royal Gazette renaming several districts. To be exact, 43 district became Mueang districts, whereas in 11 cases the word Mueang was stripped from districts which were not capital district. For example, the district Ban Don (อำเภอบ้านดอน) became Mueang Surat Thani (อำเภอเมืองสุราษฎร์ธานี), whereas Mueang Chaiya became simply Chaiya (อำเภอไชยา). Before 1938, the naming scheme was different - only those districts which date back to the provinces before the thesaphiban reforms 1892-1915 had a name with Mueang, and all other districts were named after the central subdistrict (Tambon).

Since 1938, all newly established provinces had their central district renamed accordingly, also for those provinces temporarily abolished in 1943 the Mueang was removed. There are however two further exceptions, of the four provinces annexed during World War II both Lan Chang and Phibun Songkhram had no district named Mueang.

The four district which now have a name containing Mueang without being a capital district were all created relatively recently, when apparently the fixed naming scheme was not followed that strictly anymore. In detail these are Mueang Suang (1973), Mueang Pan (1981), Mueang Chan (1992) and Mueang Yang (1995).

List of districts in 1917

I have found a very helpful entry in the Royal Gazette database - volume 34, pages 40 to 68 issued on April 29 1917. Innocently titled "ประกาศกระทรวงมหาดไทย เรื่อง เปลี่ยนชื่ออำเภอ" (Royal Order about rename of districts), this announcement not just list some name changes, but also includes all the districts which don't change their name at that time, thus it is a complete list of all the districts at that time. Sadly the monthon Krung Thep is missing, which at that time was under the control of the Ministry of Urban Affairs, and not the Interior Ministry as the others. But at least for some of the provinces abolished in 1932 I now know their territorial extend.

This announcement comes right at the end of the thesaphiban administrative reforms, as Prince Damrong resigned from his post as minister of Interior just two years earlier. With this announcement quite a lot of districts got renamed, some of the capital districts which were previously just named "Mueang" got the name of the province appended and thus already got the name they still have today. Other capital districts were renamed to have the same name as the subdistrict (tambon) which contains the district administration - which was also the main type of renamings done with this announcement. However in many cases the districts got back their historical name by the end of the 1930s.

Another thing covered by this announcement was the official change to use the term changwat (จังหวัด) for the provinces, which previously were still known as Mueang (เมือง).

I have converted the data of the announcement into a XML, which can be downloaded here. There are a few special cases where I am not fully sure about the identification of the district in the past with the modern-day one, but these are of course marked with comments within the file.

Towns and Amphoe Mueang are not the same

Something which not only confused myself originally, but also is found in some population statistics of the Thai cities is to equal the capital district (อำเภอเมือง , Amphoe Mueang) of the provinces with the city of the same name. I first learned that this is a big misunderstanding when I got hinted to a post on skyscrapercity.com, where the largest cities of Thailand were listed and explained that the actual municipal (เทศบาลน, thesaban) areas is usually much smaller than that of the same-named district. This often leads to the claims that either Chiang Mai or Nakhon Ratchasima are the second-largest city of Thailand, while in fact it is with a large distance Nonthaburi (see the list of Wikipedia).

Probably one of the reasons for this misunderstanding is the fact that the local administration like in the municipalities and the central administration going down the ladder province, district, subdistrict and village exist in parallel. All of Thailand (except the capital Bangkok) is subdivided into the central administrative units, while only some parts belong to municipalities, which take over some of the tasks from the central administration - most notably the sanitation like garbage collection or waterworks.

Pictured above is the administration office of the township (thesaban tambon) Mae Sai in the far north of Thailand.