Tambon of Krabi in 1940

The Local Directory of 1940 (ทำเนียบท้องที่ พุทธศักราช 2483) - one of the books I was able to scan from the Pridi Library - gives the number of administrative villages for every subdistrict, thus it gives me a complete list of all the Tambon in that year. As I suspect that not all the Tambon creations and dissolvements have been recording in the Royal Gazette, and the creation of more than 1000 Tambon in one year always has been very suspicious, this list should be great to consolidate my Tambon data.

Working through all 300 pages will take me several months,  yet as a proof of concept I have processed the Tambon list of Krabi, simply as that province is listed first as being the first in Thai alphabet. And with 534 Tambon today its a relatively small province.

In 1940, Krabi had 39 Tambon and 283 Muban in four districts, compared with 8 district, 53 Tambon and 389 Muban today. All of the Tambon listed in 1940 could be directly matched to a present-day one with the same name, so none was dissolved in the meantime. Only Na Nuea (ตำบลนาเหนือ) in Ao Luek isn't found directly, as it is listed as Pak Lao (ตำบลปากลาว) in the book - but corrected as Na Nuea in the appendix. Actually, the Tambon was renamed in 1940 while the book was compiled [Gazette].

Checking the other way round, there is only one Tambon not present in the 1940 list which has no Royal Gazette announcement on it being created - Sai Thai (ตำบลไสไทย) in Mueang district. It was mentioned in a Gazette announcement in 1952, so it was apparently created sometime in the 1940s. And since the 1937 census included a book with the population for each Tambon (more on that later), there is one more Tambon which changed in these years - Khao Din was renamed from Yan Sao, while it was reassigned from Surat Thani in 1937 it is already included in Krabi.

Krabi was an easy pick as a first step to work through that list, the XML with the data will slowly grow later. Sadly, there were none of the 1000 Tambon in this province, so it doesn't answer yet what was that announcement all about. Also, there were no difficulties like dissolved or renamed Tambon without any official records I could find so far. When I am running into such problems I'll certainly write about them

Number of Tambon in 1947

Table A15 - Population for Urban
and rural size group, 1947

Another interesting table found in the 1952 Statistical Yearbook are A15 and A16, which list the number of Tambon for each province, including a grouping by the population number. According to that table, in 1947 there were 3650 subdistricts, split into several categories according to the population number.

Class	Number	Population	Percent
All	3650	17442689	100.00
Urban	2695	15845125	90.85
>20,000	29	838726	4.81
10,000-19,999	250	3125378	17.92
5,000-9,999	960	6582320	37.74
2,500-4,999	1456	5298701	30.38
Rural	955	1597564	9.15
1,000-2,499	818	1507934	8.64
<1,000	137	89,630	0.51

Table A16 then gives the number of Tambon for each province, split into the urban and rural Tambon. While these numbers arer interesting by themselves - though would be even better if have numbers to compare from other censuses - for me the most important one is the absolute number, as I intend to have a complete overview when which subdistrict was created. Calculating back from the current number of subdistrict and all the subdistrict creations published in the Royal Gazette, I get to a number of 4581 in 1950 - or maybe a few more as my algorithm doesn't handle the abolished entities correctly yet. This leaves about 1000 Tambon missing - though there is the strange 1947 Royal Gazette announcement on the creation of 674 Tambon.

I have two other very old Tambon numbers, the 1964 Statistical Yearbook lists 4893 for the reference date February 17 (my algorithm says 4889 for January 1st), and more interesting the 1917 Yearbook gives a number of 5052. Thus it seems it were not just the Monthon and some provinces which were abolished in the 1930s, but also many subdistricts, and these unlike the higher administrative units were never announced in the Royal Gazette.

It seems the only way to find more information to resolve these number issues will be old issues of the Loyal Directory book (ทำเนียบท้องที่), something which can only be done in a few libraries in Thailand. The Pridi Banomyong Library at the Thammasat University has the 1940 (2483) issue - I hope I will find chance to visit there during my forthcoming vacation in Thailand, and hope I will be allowed to photograph all the relevant pages to compile a digital list later. The book is in the rare book collection, and given its age probably must be handled with lot of care. It would be just great if this whole book series would get scanned and made publicly available - even Google Books hasn't scanned any of them yet, though even there it would probably be inaccessible.

Subdistrict to be reassigned in Uttaradit

In the cabinet meeting last Tuesday, one of the issues discussed was the reassign of the subdistrict Tha Faek (ตำบลท่าแฝก) from Tha Pla district to Nam Pat in Uttaradit province. To quote from the transcript of the cabinet meeting. Hopefully my translation is not totally wrong.

คณะรัฐมนตรีมีมติเห็นชอบร่างพระราชกฤษฎีกาเปลี่ยนเขตอำเภอท่าปลากับอำเภอน้ำปาด จังหวัดอุตรดิตถ์ พ.ศ. …. ที่สำนักงานคณะกรรมการกฤษฎีกาตรวจพิจารณาแล้ว ตามที่กระทรวงมหาดไทย (มท.) เสนอ แล้วให้ดำเนินการต่อไปได้

มท. เสนอว่า เนื่องจากตำบลท่าแฝก รวม 9 หมู่บ้าน ประชากรรวม 4,441 คน 1,355 หลังคาเรือน อยู่ห่างอำเภอท่าปลา 116 กิโลเมตร ทำให้ประชาชนได้รับความเดือนร้อนไม่สะดวกในการเดินทางไปติดต่อราชการและขอรับบริการงานต่าง ๆ แต่หากเปลี่ยนแปลงเขตการปกครองท้องที่โดยนำตำบลท่าแฝกไปขึ้นกับอำเภอน้ำปาด ซึ่งมีระยะทางห่างเพียง 59 กิโลเมตร อันเป็นการแก้ไขปัญหาความเดือดร้อนดังกล่าวให้แก่ประชาชน จะทำให้ประชาชนได้รับความสะดวกในทุก ๆ ด้าน ทั้งนี้ การโอนตำบลท่าแฝก อำเภอท่าปลา ไปขึ้นกับอำเภอน้ำปาด จังหวัดอุตรดิตถ์ ได้ผ่านความเห็นชอบจากราษฎรในตำบล สภาองค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล ที่ประชุมหัวหน้าส่วนราชการประจำอำเภอทั้งสองอำเภอ สภาองค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัด และที่ประชุมหัวหน้าส่วนประจำจังหวัดแล้ว

The cabinet has approved the draft decree to change the area of Tha Pla and Nam Pat district, Uttaradit. The Office of Juridical Council has already reviewed the proposal. The Ministry of Interior (MOI) then continued to propose this draft decree.

MOI states that Tha Faek subdistrict covers 9 administrative villages and 4441 citizen in 1355 household. It is located 116 kilometer from Tha Pla district [office] which causes the citizen inconvenience. Nam Pat district [office] is only 59 kilometer away, which will make it more convenient for the people in every aspect. The transfer of Tha Faek from Tha Pla to Nam Pat was already approved by the citizen in the subdistrict, the council of the subdistrict administrative organization, a conference with the section chief of the government offices of both districts, the council of the provincial administrative organization and the heads of the provincial government.

I first read about this proposal in July last year, when it was first discussed in the Board to consider draft laws [Meeting Transcript]. To become effective, this draft decree must be published in the Royal Gazette first, I am not sure whether it needs the formal approval by parliament as well - but given that this parliament is filled with people selected by the same junta choosing the cabinet members I don't expect any larger delays and guess it will come into effect early next year.

Looking at the map, the reason for this change becomes obvious - since the creation of the Sirikit dam in 1974 the area of Tha Faek became even more disconnected from the center of Tha Pla district than it already was before, actually it is surprising it took 40 years to adjust the administration to the changed traffic situation.

Local government units covering more than one subdistrict

About half a year ago, a discussion on the best outline of the Amphoe articles on the German Wikipedia raised the question how many of the subdistrict administrative organizations (SAO/TAO) don't cover the same area as the corresponding subdistrict. I couldn't answer back then, I only knew that the about 900 subdistrict municipalities created in 1999 usually cover only parts of a subdistrict, so the TAO covers the remaining parts; and I knew that especially in Ayutthaya province, several adjoining subdistricts are merged together to one single TAO. However, I could not give the actual numbers for each category of TAO.

In order to be able to give these numbers, I started to add a new XML tag to my data files, but only did this for a few provinces at first. Luckily, my fellow Wikipedian hdamm came to help and also added these tags to many of the XML files, so right now the central and southern provinces are completely tagged, as well as most of the northern provinces and some of those in the northeast. Though there are still 1285 local government missing, I think it is worth to give a partial answer now - at least to show that this blog isn't dead, I just was too busy with other tasks and thus haven't found the time to writeup good postings here.

Right now, there are 7852 local governments, of which the 76 provincial administrative organization and Bangkok are special cases which are out of this statistics. Those considered are

• 30 cities (Thesaban Nakhon, เทศบาลนคร)
• 175 towns (Thesaban Mueang, เทศบาลเมือง)
• 2235 subdistrict municipalities (Thesaban Tambon, เทศบาลตำบล)
• 5334 subdistrict administrative organizations (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล)
• 1 special administrative area (i.e. Pattaya)

For 1285 of these 7775 the data isn't entered yet, but those which have a coverage defined fall into the following three categories.

• 4497 (69%) cover exactly one subdistrict
• 1509 (23%) cover one subdistrict partially
• 485 (7%) cover more than one subdistrict at least in part (118 of these are TAO)
• 125 (2%) cover more than one subdistrict, and all of them completely (71 of these are TAO)

I'll post an update of this statistics once I have it for all of the local governments.

How many tambon are there in Thailand?

I always thought that the question on the number of Tambon (subdistrict) is a trivial one, as several government publication list the number of subdivisions, and they all consistently give a number of 7255 (or 7424 if including the subdistricts of Bangkok, which however actually are a different type of administrative unit) - for example the 2012 list from DOPA, or the 2013 list I didn't noticed yet. I never questioned that number, as I thought the department within the Ministry of Interior would know their numbers well.

But now I am in email contact with someone who has compiled his own lists of municipalities and subdistricts, and then cross-checked then with my spreadsheet. Quite helpful, it showed several cases where I had small mistakes within my lists, as well as clearing up some in his lists. He had a few more subdistricts in his list than me, and I also had a subdistrict named Som Kai (ตำบลสมก๋าย) in Chiang Mai listed as an active subdistrict, even though it was one which was not created, but got a the geocode 50061400 assigned already. But after removing that one, I noticed I still have one subdistrict too much - the corresponding sheet had 7425 subdistricts, thus 7256 Tambon.

Checking with the population numbers from DOPA, the additional Tambon stayed, apparently there are 7256 populated Tambon. Next step then was to check with a Excel sheet showing the subdivision numbers for each province, which also had 7255 Tambon altogether - and with that one I could nail it down to be Nakhon Si Thammarat province to have the additional subdistrict. According to that spreadsheet (and several other sources), the province has 169 Tambon - actually a lot of source show a number of 165, even the website of the province administration itself, which is even more wrong. But I have 170 Tambon, and with a 2003 book listing all the Muban I was able to find the culprit - Pak Phanang district is listed there without the subdistrict Pak Phanang (ตำบลปากพนัง). The only thing special about that subdistrict is the fact that it is completely covered by the town Pak Phanang (เทศบาลเมืองปากพนัง), and thus has no subdivision in to Muban anymore, nor any village or subdistrict headmen. But that is not unique to this Tambon, there are several of this kind in larger towns or cities. In fact, the subdistrict was identical with the area of the town until the town was enlarged in 1993 [Gazette].

Center of Pak Phanang district in 2003

With two offices within DOPA contradicting already, I wasn't able to find any more solid proof in either direction. amphoe.com for example includes a map showing the Tambon of Pak Phanang with only 17 Tambon, even the Royal Gazette is no help - obviously there is no announcement abolishing this subdistrict, but an announcement from 2003 defining the boundaries of the subdistricts again only lists 17 subdistrict. Another announcement from the same year however on land expropriation includes a map which shows this subdistrict.

If anyone can help to clear up this confusion I would be happy, so far I can only find that something is very odd around there.

Tambon articles on Wikipedia

Right now the Wikimania conference  in Haifa is underway and unlike the previous conferences even made it into the mainstream news this time, so I think it is time to have a look again at the coverage of the administrative subdivisions in the English Wikipedia.

Screenshot of a Wikipedia article
on a Thai district

Starting with a positive issue - some some days already an anonymous user is adding the IPA spelling to all of the district articles, something which should help those struggling with the right pronunciation by the sometimes misleading RTGS transcription. But the main point of this posting is a less positive development, at least the way I see it.

When some years ago a Thai Wikipedian and myself worked on creating articles for each of the districts, it was a quite fruitful cooperation - getting the content from amphoe.com translated by my co-worker, and myself adding all of the tabular data and fixing some language glitches. As a result, there are now articles for every district containing at least some valuable information. As I did the tables with the subdistricts, it was myself who decided it would be better not to prepare links to all the 7255 subdistricts and leave them for later when there is more to add. In fact, the same was done with the provinces at first when I did not think there would be enough interest to get one level deeper in the near future.

But currently, there is at least one user very active to create articles for the subdistricts, but the big problem - they have no real content. For example, the one on Tha Mae Lop in Lamphun reads

Tha Mae Lop (Thai: ?) is a village and tambon (subdistrict) of Mae Tha District, in Lamphun Province, Thailand. In 2005 it had a total population of 3032 people. The tambon contains 6 villages.

Everything in these two sentences is just what is written in the table in the article on Mae Tha district - population, administrative villages and obviously the location. But already the reference to ThaiTambon.com within the article points on the base page instead to the page on this specific Tambon, and even the Thai spelling wasn't copied. Even worse was the one on Nai Mueang subdistrict - it was a similar short article on the subdistrict of Mueang Lamphun district, though in fact there are 23 subdistrict with that name all over Thailand.

If you compare that with the article on Ban Mae (San Pa Tong district, Chiang Mai province) which I have spend an hour to bring into a reasonable state, at least having all the easily available tabular data, the location, weblinks and references. If I could read Thai better, some of the content from ThaiTambon.com could also be added.

The German Wikipedia is quite strict rules on the basic requirements of an article, to avoid useless one-sentence articles, and I guess the one on Mae Tha would go directly into the "deletion hell". I usually prefer the more laissez-faire approach in the English Wikipedia, but these article have their problems:

• Created by a non-Thai without any knowledge on the topic they have mistakes or serious omissions.
  
• Without any active and knowledgeable contributors, these articles will be almost never maintained after creation, like no updates with newer data. I even could not manage to keep the district articles up-to-date with all the municipal changes due to lack of time and focus on other issues, so "adopting" the Tambon articles would only tenfold my workload.
  
• Hardly ever read, these articles will collect vandalism which will stay unnoticed for years. This already happens for the districts articles when I don't check my special watchlist often enough.

Already four years ago, another Wikipedian created articles for all the subdistricts in Phitsanulok province, but for those also include information collected from ThaiTambon.com. But except bot activity and an occasional move due to duplicate names, nothing has been done on these articles since then. At least there seemed to be no vandalism yet either.

Numbered subdistricts

Among the 7255 subdistricts, there are several with an interesting history behind their naming. One group of subdistricts has their names being simply numbered, named from Khlong One to Khlong Twelve. The first seven of these subdistricts are within the district Khlong Luang of Pathum Thani province, and two futher are in Nong Chok district within Bangkok. However, while the whole number range from one to seven is covered in Pathum Thani, those two in Bangkok have the number 10 and 12 - as far as I know there never was a subdistrict named Khlong 8, 9 or 11.

When I was looking through some very old announcements in the Royal Gazette, one on the 1915 relocation of the district office on Mueang district in the no longer existing Thanyaburi province lists the previous location as being within the subdistrict Khlong Soi Thi 10 (ตำบลคลองซอยที่ 10) [Gazette]. By using the search function with the Gazette database, it seems the "soi thi" (meaning "branch number") was dropped from the subdistrict names in 1919. The same function also returns that there were subdistricts which had some additional words after the number, e.g. ตำบลคลองซอยที่ ๑๓ ฝั่งตะวันออก (Subdistrict Branch Canal number 13 east side). Sadly I have no complete list of subdistricts of that time, and also many of the subdistrict renamings back then were not announced in the Royal Gazette, so I have no overview how many subdistricts there were originally with this naming scheme.

Map of Rangsit area, source

But the base of this naming system is obvious, as the north-south oriented canals (Khlong, คลอง) branching from Khlong Rangsit are simply numbered, and thus the subdistricts were simply named after the canal where they are located. As the canals were the main way of transport at that time, all of the villages were located right at the canal anyway, the land between was then used for farming.

Tough it focuses more on the irrigation plans for the western rim of the Chao Phraya, the book King of the Waters: Homan Van Der Heide And the Origin of Modern Modern Irrigation in Siam by Han Ten Brummelhuis gives a great overview over the agricultural expansion at the beginning of the 20th century, of which the Rangsit area was only one part.

One Tambon One ...

Yesterday the official government news outlet at the Public Relations Department had one article titled Govt to launch 1 Tambon 1 Temple for merit making on Sunday. While this specific program - setting up a Buddhist ceremony each Sunday in one temple of each subdistrict - is not really relevant to this blog, the title of this scheme is.

Since the One Tambon One Project (OTOP) became a success, the "One Tambon One ..." meme has been adopted for many other projects. Especially when such projects are set to be adopted nation-wide on a local level, and both in urban as well as rural areas, a catchy name for the project using this meme is almost inevitable. So I have done some searching and looked for some other project with this scheme.

Of course, the first one to note is the project where I am active a little bit as well, the One Tambon One Photo blog. It is currently dormant, but I hope it will come back to life and grow into a Thai clone of the Geograph project.

The only other project I had noticed in the news before is the One Tambon One Ricemill project - or actually One Tambon One Granary One Mill aimed at making the rice processing more local to give the local areas more of the income generated from the agriculture. Another one I crossed in Google in past is the One Tambon One Search and Rescue Team, aimed to have a local disaster response. Also One Tambon One Wife as a sarcastic term for the marriage of Thai women with foreigners I had read about before.

But that's far from all, the following I have only now found, so they probably haven't made that much impression, either because they quietly worked on the local level, or even more quietly were halted again. I have not much information about them, so I just link the page where I found them...

• One Tambon, One Park
• One Tambon One Wetland
• One Tambon One Outstanding School, also translated as One Tambon One Dream School
• One Tambon One Scholarship
• One Tambon One Megawatt

And I am sure those weren't all...

Consolidation of central administrative unit names

During the thesaphiban reforms at the beginning of the 20th century, the central administration hierarchy Monthon, Changwat, Amphoe, Tambon, Muban was created all over the country - however the levels below Monthon differed in the various parts of the country. Most notably, until 1916 the provinces were usually named Mueang since these were the historic precursor of the modern-day provinces.

Thus the announcement ประกาศกระทรวงมหาดไทย เรื่อง ทรงพระกรุณาโปรดเกล้า ฯ ให้เปลี่ยนคำว่าเมืองเรียกว่าจังหวัด from May 1916 changes two things - the Mueang (เมือง) are thereafter called Changwat (จังหวัด) and the Mueang governor (ผู้ว่าราชการเมือง) is thereafter known as province governor (ผู้ว่าราชการจังหวัด). I am not sure what the other text of this three-paged document is about, if I don't misunderstand it the use of "Amphoe Mueang" is also defined in there.

However actually the term "changwat" is a bit older already. I just recently discovered another announcement from 1908, in which for the Monthon Phayap, i.e. the area now known as northern Thailand, the modern names were introduced already. In same order as defined in the document these are

• District officer นายแขวง to นายอำเภอ
• District แขวง to อำเภอ
• Subdistrict headman นายแคว้น to กำนัน
• Subdistrict แคว้น to ตำบล
• Village headman แก่บ้าน to ผู้ใหญ่บ้าน
• Province บริเวณ to จังหวัด

The last one is the most interesting one. I already posted about another announcement which made me understand that in fact the Boriwen were the procursor of the provinces, also dating from 1908 and covering the area of Monthon Udon. In there the Boriwen were however renamed to Mueang. The only remaining Monthon which had Boriwen is Isan, which covered the southeastern part of the Khorat plateau, I only haven't yet found the Royal Gazette announcement changing the Boriwen in there to either Mueang or Changwat.

Subdistrict and TAO boundaries

In the transcript of the meeting 14/2553 of March 4 by board 2 of the board to consider draft laws - those transcripts where I normally only check for the municipality upgrades - it had only one topic on the agenda.

Villagers from Ban Takhian Khu (บ้านตะเคียนคู่), Mu 13 of Takhop subdistrict, Pak Thong Chai district, Nakhon Ratchasima province have complained about the bad road towards the district office, and since the one of Wang Nam Khiao is only 12 km (compared to 46 km to Pak Thong Chai) they requested to have the village attached to the TAO Wang Nam Khio.

Though the request is denied by the board, and the villages have to ask for an adjust of the district boundaries instead, the rationale for this decision is interesting. The transcript quotes the relevant Tambon Council and Tambon Administrative Organization Act of 1992, which in section 41 states that TAO with adjoining borders and in the same district can join into a single TAO. At first, this is only allowed within the same district, and also does only cover the dissolution of one TAO and joining into the neighboring TAO. Therefore this section does not say anything on a boundary change, something which seems not to be mentioned at all in this act. Yet it seems the board follows the interpretation that a TAO boundary must coincide with the subdistrict boundary - except of course there's an overlapping municipality.

Another Thai website spreading malware

Warning screen for amphoe.com last year

Since at least last Thursday, ThaiTambon.com has joined the club of high-profile Thai websites which have been hacked by using well-known security holes and have been converted into malware-spreading sites. Anyone using Firefox will now get a big red warning screen that accessing the site is not recommended, also any Google hits now have a warning line under the link, and won't lead to the infected site directly anymore.

For ThaiTambon it is really a loss, though the main focus of the site is the promotion of the OTOP (One Tambon One Product) products, it also contains information on all of the 7255 subdistricts, however of varying quality. Sometimes just the neighboring subdistricts, sometimes a full history and a list of all the villages. Though it thus can hardly be used as the sole source, it is a often a valuable tool for researching some local histories, so it'd be a loss if the webmaster won't fix the problem soon.

Other websites in this hall of shame, all being in this club for several weeks or months already, are the Thai senate, the upper house of the parliament, as well as the Royal Institute, the caretaker of Thai language. But failing to use the latest version of the content management system isn't the largest problem of the webmaster at Thaitambon, even more any attempt to contact them is doomed because they failed to keep their mailserver running. And I am sure this email is supposed to work, as on the archived version of the site in 2008 showed it.
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

webmaster@thaitambon.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
The recipient server did not accept our requests to connect.
[mail.thaitambon.com. (5): Connection refused]

Update As of April 8 the warning in Google has disappeared, so apparently the webmaster has cleaned the site now.

Ministerial order on subdistrict rename

I was trying to find alternative sources for the acts and laws on the changes of the administrative entities, e.g. for those on the administrative villages (muban) which are only published in the Royal Gazette since 2002. Also, it seems a few acts get lost and never show up in the Gazette database. Google found one page which seemed to be on the rename of a muban in 1969 on the website www.lawreform.go.th titled

0050/2513 การเปลี่ยนแปลงชื่อหมู่บ้านและตำบลในกฎกระทรวง ฉบับที่ 428 (พุทธศักราช 2512) ออกตามความในพระราชบัญญัติป่าสงวนแห่งชาติ พุทธศักราช 2507

which means "Change of name of village and subdistrict in ministerial order issue 428 (B.E. 2512 = 1969) in order with the national park act B.E. 2507 (1964)". The ministerial order is available both as a scanned PDF as well as plain HTML, and especially the second makes it easy to copy and paste the text to e.g. Google Translate to get more of the meaning.

Apparently both the district and village Na Bo Kham (ตำบลนาบ่อคำ), Mueang Kamphaeng Phet district, Kamphaeng Phet province, was misnamed Bo Dam (ตำบลบ่อดำ). Actually while writing this posting I discovered that this ministerial order is in fact not a real rename, but a correction for an announcement in the Royal Gazette. Google did not find any website with the subdistrict Bo Dam, and in the Gazette database it has exactly one announcement mentioning it - กฎกระทรวง ฉบับที่ ๔๒๘ (พ.ศ. ๒๕๑๒) ออกตามความในพระราชบัญญัติป่าสงวนแห่งชาติ พ.ศ. ๒๕๐๗ with the additional comment "กำหนดให้ป่าคลองวังเจ้า และป่าคลองสวนหมาก ในท้องที่ตำบลโกสัมพี ตำบลนครชุม ตำบลบ่อดำ ตำบลโป่งน้ำร้อน และตำบลลานดอกไม้ อำเภอเมืองกำแพงเพชร จังหวัดกำแพงเพชร เป็นป่าสงวนแห่งชาติ". This announcement published on June 6 1969 was on the creation of the national forest Khlong Wang Chao (ป่าคลองวังเจ้า) and Khlong Suan Mak (ป่าคลองสวนหมาก), which also covered parts of the subdistrict Na Bo Kham. And in this announcement the subdistrict was misspelled, and hence the correction accessible on that lawreform website.

Subdistrict name romanization

When I originally discovered the book ชื่อจังหวัด อำเภอ/กิ่งอำเภอ ตำบล เขต และแขวง ไทย-อังกฤษ (Thai-English transcription of changwat, amphoe, king amphoe, tambon, khet, and khwang approved by the Royal Institute, ISBN 9789747857047) as an eBook at the website of the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA), it was only available as four PDF files, which made it quite some work to go through all the 7000+ subdistricts and check and correct the names in my spreadsheet.

I was now recently browsing through the announcements at the website amphoeyim.com (District Smile), another website from the Ministry of Interior around the district administration, just to look if there anything new to me. It also had the same publication online there, however once I downloaded it to my surprise it was two Excel files and two PDF, the actual data now in much easier readable form. Funnily, the original source at DOPA had also changed since I last checked it and also contains the two Excel sheets instead of the PDF with the tables.

As the XLS files are last changed in 2007, they obviously cannot include fixes to the mistakes I noted back then - see my own sheet with the dubious or wrong transcriptions - nor contain the new subdistricts created in Bangkok last year.

I don't know if there will be any new edition of the book, yet even better than such a reference book would be an online list continuously updated, for example adding the transcription into the geocode list.

By the way, if anyone can get me the paper version of that book it'd be a nice addition to my library, though just for collection. If I recall correctly, I read that the book was mostly distributed to libraries, including the local ones in each province - maybe wasn't even sold commercially.

One Tambon too much

When I was revamping the code to create the list of the most common subdistrict names, I noticed that I accidentally included more subdistrict than the 7255 listed in the annual statistics from DOPA. These were subdistricts already abolished, or planned but not created ones. But even after that my code still found one subdistrict more, so I looked for which province was the problem - but found wrong subdistrict numbers in census data first which I will post on soon as well.

The E-Book with all the Muban names from DOPA includes statistics as well, and there the numbers matched with mine, except the one case I was looking for. This turned out to be in Pak Phanang district, Nakhon Si Thammarat province, which has 17 or 18 subdistricts. The only subdistrict which is suspicious is Pak Phanang (ตำบลปากพนัง) itself.

Yet there are some sources including this subdistrict and other which don't. The most authoritative should be the definition of the subdistrict boundaries in this district, published in the Royal Gazette in 2003. This only lists 17 subdistricts; however on the other hand the DOPA population statistics includes this subdistrict as part of the municipality Pak Phanang (เทศบาลเมืองปากพนัง). On ThaiTambon.com the code 801201 of this subdistrict is missing.

Other sources are maps, the map from amphoe.com shows no such subdistrict. Other maps do show it, for example Google Earth or MapGuideThailand. And since I did not know about these problems back then, the subdistrict map I created for Wikipedia also shows it.

So I am puzzled, since I find nothing on a subdistrict abolishment in the Gazette, but also don't believe in a mistake in the DOPA entity numbers.

Thaification of district and subdistrict names

The two premierships of Field Marshall Phibun Songkhram 1938 to 1944 and again 1948 to 1957 were marked with a strong nationalistic politics, like forcing to use the central Thai language instead of the regional dialects (or even the Yawi used in the deep south provinces), the banning of several occupations for the Chinese immigrants and so on. I first became aware of this policy with respect to the administrative subdivision via the Wikipedia article on Non Thai district in Nakhon Ratchasima province, which was renamed from Non Lao to Non Thai in 1941.

While this was the only district which got its non-Thai roots removed from the name, there were quite a lot of subdistrict which were equally renamed in the 1939 announcement.

• Lao (ลาว): Non Lao to Non Thai (Nakhon Ratchasima), Phueng Lao to Phueng Ruang, Ban Lao to Thap Kwang, Salari Lao to Mueang Kao, Muang Lao to Muang Ngam (Saraburi). In Saraburi it had a lot of Vientiane Lao forcibly resettled there in 1779.
• Chin(ese) (จีน): Ban Chin to Chalong (Satun), Nong Chin to Khok Sai (Phatthalung), Wat Sam Chin to Sam Yaek (Phra Nakhon, i.e. Bangkok), Bang Nang Chin to Thai Hat (Samut Songkhram)
• Mon (มอญ): Ban Mon to Sam Suan (Chaiyaphum), Ban Mon to Ban Kao (Chonburi), Ku Mon to Hua Sai (Chachoengsao), Tha Mon to Khun Kaeo (Nakhon Pathom) Na Mon Nuea to Ban Na and Na Mon Tai to Khlong Cham Long (Sukhothai), Bang Mon to Ton Pho (Singburi)
• Khmer (เขมร): Wang Khmer to Tha Dong Rang (Kanchanaburi)

And the above linked announcement isn't the only one, there was another in 1940 containing more subdistricts with Chin and Mon in their names removed.

One Tambon One Photo

Last month an old fellow from the Thai forums contacted me to discuss his idea of creating a Thailand offspring of Geograph. Geograph is a Web 2.0 project which aims to collect representative photographs and information on every square kilometer of Great Britain and Ireland. The project is very successful, as one can see in the map to the right many areas a fully red, the color chosen for squares having at least one photo. A German offspring has been launched already as well, but there the map is still green almost everywhere - I did not heard about that one before, but now already uploaded some of my photo stock from my home country.

But this blog is on Thailand, and it is just a natural idea to extend this project to more countries, so he had this idea but not the ability to set up and host such a big site. Besides, to make a Geograph Thailand really work it must be bilingual, most Thai would be too shy to contribute on an English only website, and without Thai contributors it will be hard to get much content. So in order to promote this idea and find more co-workers, he instead now started a blog titled "One Tambon One Photo", to collect and present a representative photo for each of the 7255 subdistricts (Tambon). With a daily posting, this blog can run for 19 years without repeating itself, though quite clearly it will get more difficult once the touristic hotspots have been covered. Yet I am sure there are many potential non-Thai contributors who'd like to present their photos from remote places, so this blog could become a fun collaborative project as well as just interesting to read.

Subdistrict spelling change in Nakhon Si Thammarat?

While ystematically adding the websites of all the subdistrict administrative organizations (TAO) in Nakhon Si Thammarat province to my XML, at first I could not find the one for Tha Phaya, Pak Phanang district. The only website which contained the term "องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลท่าพยา" was the article on the district in the Thai wikipedia. This seemed strange, as even for TAO without a website there usually are some pages using the term. After a bit of searching I finally found the website at thapaya.go.th - the reason I could not find it before is that it is spelled "องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลท่าพญา". The two letters Yo Yak (ย) and Yo Ying (ญ) are absolute equivalent, so this spelling change does not change the pronunciation at all.

However all of the sources from the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA), e.g. the geocode list or the population statistics all use the spelling ท่าพยา. Also, the original announcement in the Royal Gazette on the creation of the TAO (see Item 699 on page 71) uses ท่าพยา, and I haven't seen any announcement on a spelling change. On the other hand, ThaiTambon.com uses the same spelling as the TAO, indicating that not only the TAO but also the Tambon changed its spelling.

Though I had not much hope of a reply, I tried to ask the TAO for an explantion, but thins time the email wasn't ignored - because they misconfigured the mail server so any email sent to manager@thapaya.go.th bounced right away. And I doubt anyone would ever find my question in the forum, as it seems only frequented by spam bots.

Abolished subdistricts of Mueang Nakhon Si Thammarat district

I already knew for quite some time that there must have been two subdistrict in Mueang Nakhon Si Thammarat district which were abolished, simply because two codes in are omitted in the list of subdistrict codes. I even already found the names for these subdistricts back then, but never been able to find when they were actually abolished.

• 800104 - ตำบลนา (Na)
• 800105 - ตำบลศาลามีชัย (Sala Mi Chai)

Since the DOPA codes were probably introduced around 1984, I was trying to find anything about these subdistricts in the 1980s without success. But now I looked into an announcement on the change of subdistrict areas in Mueang Nakhon Si Thammarat district (เปลี่ยนแปลงเขตตำบลในท้องที่อำเภอเมืองนครศรีธรรมราช) from 1966 I think I found the long sought-after trace. Though it does not explicitly states the abolishment of the subdistrict, it seems all of the villages of these subdistricts were reassigned and absorbed by the town Nakhon Si Thammarat, and the remained added to one village in another subdistrict.

If I am right that the two subdistrict were in fact abolished back then, it is surprising that they still got codes assigned 20 years later. In all other cases I knew no retrospect codes were created, even though there were not that many necessary and it should have been possible to keep more code spaces for those former entities.

The announcement, which is a followup to the enlargement of the municipality in the previous year (Gazette), reads in its most important part as following:

๑. โอนท้องทีของหมู่ที ๑๐ ตำบลท่ารือ ท้องทีของหมู่ที ๑ หมู่ที ๒ และหมู่ที ๓ ตำบลศาลามีชัย ท้องทีของหมู่ที ๑ หมู่ที ๒ และหมู่ที ๓ ตำบลนา ท้องทีของหมู่ที ๒ และหมู่ที ๔ ตำบลปากนคร ท้องทีของหมู่ที ๕ ตำบลปากพูน และท้องทีของหมู่ที ๒ และหมู่ที ๔ ตำบลท่าซัก เฉพาะส่วนทีถูกตัดเข้าอยู่ในเขตเทศบาลเมืองนครศรีธรรมราชให้ไปขึ้นรวมกับตำบลในเมือง ตำบลคลัง และตำบลท่าวัง ตามลำดับโดยมีเขตตรงตามหลักเขตของเทศบาล

1. Transfer of Village 10 of subdistrict Tha Ruea, Village 1, 2 and 3 of subdistrict Sala Mi Chai, Village 1, 2 and 3 of subdistrict Na, Village 2 and 4 of subdistrict Pak Nakhon, Village 5 of subdistrict Pak Phun and Village 4 of subdistrict Tha Sak, specifically the area cut off and added to Nakhon Si Thammarat municipality and added to the subdistrict Nai Mueang, Khlang and Tha Wang in order to be in line with the boundary of the municipality.

๒. โอนท้องทีของหมู่ที ๑ และหมู่ที ๓ ตำบลศาลามีชัย และท้องทีของหมู่ที ๑ และหมู่ที ๓ ตำบลนา เฉพาะส่วนทีเหลือจากทีตัดเข้าอยู่ในเขตเทศบาลเมืองนครศรีธรรมราช ไปรวมกับหมู่ที ๔ ตำบลศาลามีชัย และตั้งเป็นหมู่ที ๕ ตำบลปากนคร โดยมีเขตตรงตามหลักเขตของเทศบาล

2. Transfer of Village 1 and 3 of subdistrict Sala Mi Chai and Village 1 and 3 of subdistrict Na, specifically the area which remains after cut off and adding to Nakhon Si Thammarat municipality, add it with Village 4 of subdistrict Sala Mi Chai and make it to become Village 5 of subdistrict Pak Nakhon, in order to be in line with the boundary of the municipality.

Number of subdistrict creations per year

The chart shows the number of subdistricts created in each year - in fact in contrast to my previous subdistrict statistics it's the date when the creation took effect, not the date when it was published, but for most cases this does not make much difference.

Quite notable is the low number in the 1950s, with some years skipping creations altogether. Since 1960 the number slowly rose from 30 to 100 in 1980. Since then it was rather stable at 100 new subdistricts each year, until the creations ceased altogether after 1997.

Subdistrict name changes after 1947

The many subdistrict creations announced in 1947 include several cases where the names used in these announcement differs from the current name, but without the renaming ever announced in the Royal Gazette. A complete list of the name changes I found would be way to lengthy for the blog, so I only pick a few examples which show the different kinds of changes which happened.

The first one is the obvious one, the name changed but without explicitly mention it. For example, in Ranong the subdistrict La-un Nuea (ละอุ่นเหนือ) was split off from La-un (ละอุ่น). But additionally to this La-un was probably renamed to La-un Tai (ละอุ่นใต้), at least that is it's named now, and it makes most sense to happen together with the split. And the same happened with neighboring Bang Phra (บางพระ), where also the northern part was split off and the southern part probably got renamed simultaneously.

There are also subdistrict spellings which I suspect are simply misspellings, as the whole announcements were written by hand these might have slipped through. For example the subdistrict Krado in Yarang, Pattani, is spelled กระโด nowadays. In the 1947 announcement it is however spelled ปะโด (Pado), maybe in fact it was simple a spelling change from กะโด, only the R (ร) letter added later. One case where I have proof of the mistake is Lathai, Kanthararom, Si Sa Ket. This one is spelled both ทะลาย (Thalai) and ละทาย (Lathai) in the same announcement, so the first occurrence must have been a switching of letters. Or Khlong Khut (คลองขุด) in Mueang Satun district is spelled ลองขุด, simply omitting the first letter.

Already mentioned in the previous paragraph, in several only the spelling changed, which kept the name phonetically same or at least close. There were probably several smaller spelling reforms, not as drastic as the simplified spellings used 1942-44 but still noticeable. For example when Rahan (ระหาร) became Lahan (ละหาร) in Bang Bua Thong, Nonthaburi this was probably an adjustment of the spelling to the actual pronunciation; funnily the word Pho (โพธิ์) in Pho Talad Kaeo (โพธิ์ตลาดแก้ว) changed spelling to the simpler โพ, but in Pho Rang Nok (โพธิ์รังนก) the old name had the spelling โพรังนก. Another example where a silent letter was omitted in Kaeo Chan, which changed from เกาะจันทร์ to เกาะจัน.

In all of the above examples it is easy to match the spelling in the old announcement with the modern spelling and thus identify the subdistrict. While I believe I could correctly identify all the subdistricts mentioned in the 1947 announcements, there were a few cases where it was very difficult. In one case after the search of the 1947 subdistrict I noticed that in fact I even misidentified that one in a later announcement. In 1947 the subdistrict in Mueang Udon Thani district was named Nong Bu (หนองบุ), and it was renamed to Nong Na Kham (หนองนาคำ) after 1974. Due to the similar sound I misidentified it with Nong Bua (หนองบัว), but actually Nong Bua was split off from Nong Bu in 1947.