The provincial administration of Siam from 1892 to 1915

2005 Thai edition

Tej Bunnag's book "The provincial administration of Siam from 1892 to 1915" was the first academic source I checked when I started writing about the topic in Wikipedia articles. Being long out of print (published in 1977), used copies are only found at ludicrous high prices, luckily I back then scanned all pages so I at least have my private e-book version of it. In 2005, a second edition was published, but only in Thai - and though I have that one my Thai is still way too bad to read anything.

But now by coincidence I stumbled on the original 1969 doctoral thesis, which was the basis for the book. The University of Oxford, where Tej Bunnag studied and graduated, had made the original version an open access item, so it can now be downloaded and read easily by everyone. Not sure whether I'll find the time to actually check what changes were done between the thesis and the book version, in fact more interesting would be any changes which were done for the Thai edition.

Regions and Vice-Roys 1915 to 1925

One quite unknown historical subdivision were the regions created in 1915 after the resignation of Prince Damrong, officially due to health reasons but it was an open secret that the prince did not get along with the new king well. The only thing I know about these regions is the following paragraph in Tej Bunnags "The Provincial Administration of Siam 1892-1915".

Changes were also made in Prince Damrong's Thesaphiban system of provincial administration. Five months after his acceptance of the Prince's resignation, the King issued the Announcement of 13 December 1915 concerning the duties and powers of Viceroys. According to this Announcement, the country was to be divided into regions (phak), over which were to be placed Viceroys (Upparat) who were to be appointed by the King. The superintendent commissioners were to remain at their posts but they were to consult with the Viceroys before they undertook to deal with any emergency or any matter not covered by existing acts and regulations, before they submitted annual accounts of their monthons' revenue and expenditure to the Ministry, and before they appointed, transferred, promoted, recommended for decorations, demoted or dismissed officials upwards from the rank of district officer. In that year, the King placed Viceroys over the Phayap Region, which consisted of monthon Phayap and Maharat, and the Western Region (Phak Tawan-tok), which consisted of monthons Nakhon Chaisi and Ratburi. In 1916 and 1922, he placed Viceroys respectively over the Southern Region (Phak Tai) which consisted of monthons Chumphon, Nakhon Sithammarat, and Pattani, and the Isan Region which consisted of monthons Roi-et, Ubonratchathani, and Udonthani.

As in a footnote the author gave the title of the announcement mentioned in the text, I was able to find it in the Royal Gazette database - พระบรมราชโองการ ประกาศ ว่าด้วยหน้าที่และอำนาจอุปราช However I could not find anything on those regions introduced later, nor seem there be any list of the Monthon within the two regions established in 1915. But the whole system was rather short-lived anyway, since these regions were abolished in 1925.

As one can see in the map by the yellow parts, these regions with their vice-roys did not cover the whole country - the monthon Phuket and Nakhon Ratchasima were not part of the south or Isan region respectively, and for the whole central and eastern region there did not have regions applied at all.

Number of administrative entities 1893-1899

When browsing through the scans I have done of Tej Bunnags book "The provincial administration of Siam", I noticed that Appendix 5 gives the numbers of the subdivisions within several of the circles (monthon).

Monthon	Districts	Subdistricts	Villages
Ayutthaya	25	479	4,447
Burapha	13	80	800
Chumphon	15	152	1,515
Nakhon Chaisi	11	254	1,571
Nakhon Ratchasima	7	-	378
Nakhon Sawan	20	506	1,845
Nakhon Sithammarat	17	232	2,669
Phitsanulok	19	825	4,006
Prachinburi	16	86	390
Ratburi	20	506	1,845
Sum	163	2,769	20,495

Kedah, Phetchabun, Phuket, and Udon are missing, the author wasn't able to find them in his source. He suspects that this was due to the fact that Kedah resisted the thesaphiban reform, while the other three were just created a short time ago and thus the new system wasn't established completely yet and thus did not report the numbers to Bangkok.

The mean number of each subdivision is somewhat different from today - 17.0 subdistricts per district is more than double the current value of 8.2; the villages per subdistrict has changed less strikingly from 7.4 to 10.3.

Tej Bunnag resigns as foreign minister

Normally the current Thai politics isn't the topic of this blog, but since I announced it when his appointed as foreign minister just little more than a month ago, I should now also mention this clear sign of the near end of the Samak administration. Both Bangkok Post and The Nation have breaking news on Tej Bunnag (เตช บุนนาค) filing his resignation.

Bangkok Post says

It is yet unknown the real reason behind his resignation as Mr Tej could not be reached for comments. But it is believed that Mr Tej is discouraged by the work of the government and his tough role in explaining to foreign communities about ongoing political turmoil in Thailand.

and The Nation

The sources said Tej, former permanent secretary for foreign affairs, reasoned his resignation that his wife, Pensri, is sick.

[...]

It is still unclear why he wished to resign.

Giving Tejs credentials and the first successes in calming down the Preah Vihear conflict with Cambodia, I hope he would stand by for returning to his post in a government of national unity, which to me seems like the only way out of the current political chaos.

Misleading map

The book The Provincial Administration of Siam 1892-1915 by Tej Bunnag contains a map in the preface which shows "Siam in 1915". I mentioned it shortly already when I wrote about the monthon abolished in 1932.

As I considered (and still do) the book very authoritative, I also took this map at face value and thus supposed that the boundaries it shows are correct. The differences between the current boundaries and the ones in the book are only the provinces Amnat Charoen, Sa Kaeo and Nong Bua Lamphu created in 1993, Phayao created in 1977 and Yasothon created in 1972. Also Thonburi and Phra Nakhon are show as separate province, as they were merged in Bangkok metropolis in 1971. In the appendix the book lists the provinces of each monthon at the creation of the monthon, thus including provinces like Takua Pa or Lang Suan. As these weren't present in this map I thus thought they must have been abolished in before 1915.

So it was quite a surprise when I discovered the Royal Gazette announcement on the abolishment of monthon and provinces in 1933, and found it include all those provinces which existed at the establishment of the monthon, but were all lacking in this map. I already posted a complete list of provincial changes till 1910 here. In fact, the map not only lacks these provinces, it also lacks provincial boundary changes by reassignments of districts from one province to another. The most notable - because it's the largest district of all - is Umphang, which in 1915 still belonged to Kamphaeng Phet, but in this map its easy to see belonging to Tak.

So, in fact this map is in fact very misleading, it seems it was much less carefully researched than the other parts of the work. In fact simply shows the provincial layout of 1968 (the year the dissertation was written) with the monthon superimposed, but definitely not "Siam in 1915".

Cabinet reshuffle

The first minister of the forthcoming cabinet reshuffle has been appointed already, former US ambassador Tej Bunnag became the new foreign minister. Due to the Preah Vihear crisis, prime minister Samak obviously could not wait with this appointment any longer and leave this post vacant till he gives the full list of changes in his cabinet. Several of his ministers resigned recently for various reasons, while others came under attack as being not competent enough for their respective posts.

Tej Bunnag (เตช บุนนาค, actually pronounced "Tet"), a member of the prestigious Bunnag family, studied history in Oxford before starting to work in the foreign service in 1969. What I wasn't sure about until now is whether he is the same as the author of The Provincial Administration of Siam 1892-1915, but news reports like "Meet Tej Bunnag" now pointed me strongly to believe that it is him. That book based upon his 1968 Ph.D. dissertation is the administrative reforms by Prince Damrong, the first minister of the Interior. I am still looking to get myself a copy of this book, I only have scans from one from a library. And to make the full circle, I wonder if the current minister of the Interior, Chalerm Yubamrung (เฉลิม อยู่บำรุง), will be among those to loose his job in the forthcoming reshuffle as well since he attracted quite some criticism over his performance in office.

Books

As the administrative organization of a country is not a very "sexy" topic, the number of books about this topic is rather low, especially when not counting the books in Thai language which are not yet accessible to me. So far I only know of three books more-or-less being written about this topic:

• Tej Bunnag, The Provincial Administration of Siam 1892-1915, ISBN 0-19-580343-4, Oxford University Press, 1978. As the title suggests, the books deals with the administrative reforms (thesaphiban) under Prince Damrong as the first Interior minister of Siam. The focus is on the transition of the Mueang to the modern-day provinces. Originally led by a governor, who inherited his title to his son, and who ruled the town like a sovereign, these governors were demoted by the newly introduces Monthon administrators.
• Nelson, Michael H. 1998. Central Authority and Local Democratization in Thailand: A Case Study from Chachoengsao Province. White Lotus, Bangkok 1998. This books is about the actual politics within the local administrative structures, especially about the problems around the elections in 1992 like vote buying.
• Wales, H.G. Quaritch, Ancient Siamese Government and Administration, New York 1965 (London 1934). The topic of this book is the administration of the Sukhothai and Ayutthaya kingdoms, till the 18th century. It thus forms the historical background on the Mueang system reformed around 1900.
  

Of course also the more general history books mention the historical administration as well, but it is obviously only a small part of the contents. And it seems the above are about all the books available on this topic, as browsing through the reference sections of all my books I can only find either unpublished dissertations (actually the first two above were original dissertations as well), or articles in journals like the Journal of the Siam Society. Also only the book by Michael Nelson is still in print, and though I have them as scans in my computer I still look for the actual books, but when they show up in the online antiquarian websites they are usually quite expensive.

If anyone can recommend me a good Thai language book about these topics I'd happy to add it to my library. I guess it'd make me more diligent in learning Thai if I have something I want to read so much...

Abolished Monthon

The monthon (circles, มณฑล) were an administrative entity above the provinces, created in the administrative reforms of Prince Damrong in the 1890s and 1900s. Ever since I first read about them while collecting information for a province article on Wikipedia I wanted to find out more about these entities, and the difficulty to find information on English only made it more interesting. So I finally got myself the book The Provincial Administration of Siam 1892-1915 by Tej Bunnag from a library and got many new insights reading it - just too bad its out of print, and none of the antiquarians ever had one yet. However as the title of the book already suggests, that book ends with the resignation of Prince Damrong from his post as interior minister in 1915, and only mentions shortly that some of the monthon were abolished in 1925, and then finally after the revolution of 1932 all were abolished. So it was a minor surprise when I read the Royal Gazette entry on the abolishment of several provinces in 1932 and found out that at the same time also the monthon Pattani, Chanthaburi, Nakhon Chai Si and Nakhon Sawan were abolished and the provinces under these monthon assigned to the remaining monthon. According to a poster in the 2bangkok forum the final abolishment was a retaliation to the monthon administrators supporting the Boworndej counter revolution attempt.

The map shows the monthon as of 1915. I created the map in Tej Bunnags book to illustrate the Wikipedia article on the monthon. But actually the provinces shown in that map are those of 1932 after the abolishments mentioned above, so as soon as I find the districts within these provinces I will create a new version of that map.

Too bad my Thai is still so bad, browsing through the Royal Gazette would give many new insights or small facts almost impossible to find in English, or garbled in sloppy translations.