District names in Isan in the 1910s

In several Isan provinces the districts were named in a common scheme, until they were renamed in 1913. There were districts named Udon (อุดร), Pachin (ปจิม), Thaksin (ทักษิณ) and Uthai (อุไทย), then followed by the name of the province. Only in case of Ubon Ratchathani the second part of the district name was just the short "Ubon" or Yasothon, which was part of Ubon Ratchathani then. These scheme was at least used in the provinces Sisaket, Ubon Ratchathani, Surin, Roi Et, Maha Sarakham and Kalasin.

District creations since 1990

I am currently adding the citations from the Royal Gazette to the district articles, mostly working from present to past. I have now covered all the district created since 1990, as well as all the upgrades of minor district to full districts from 1990. So I can now do a little statistics on these last 18 years. The most obvious fact is that the last time a bigger number districts were created was on July 1 1997, as well as the last upgrade was on October 1 1997. After that there was just one district (Wachirabarami in Phichit) in 1998 and one minor district (Wiang Kao in Khon Kaen) in 2006, and now the upgrade of all the minor districts in August 2007. 1990-1997 there were between 10 to 20 new (minor) districts each year, and a similar number of minor district upgrades. Altogether 202 districts were created in this timespan.

I can only speculate what is the reason for this hiatus, my guess is that it was actually a result of the Asian financial crisis which broke out in 1997, and the government tried to save expenses by avoiding to create new posts in newly created districts. In the 1920s and 1930s there was a more severe budget crisis, which led the government to abolish several of the monthon and provinces to cut expenses, as mentioned earlier.

Maybe a lot of new districts are in the pipeline now, catching up the 10 years of no new district. Maybe the already assigned geocodes I talked about earlier are the new districts to be created soon?

Non-unique district names

Nowadays all the districts have unique names, with the notable exception of the five districts named Chaleom Phra Kiat, created in celebration of the 50th anniversary of HM the King ascension to the throne. There are a few more cases where only the English spelling is not unique, but the Thai spelling and pronunciation is different.

There are some interesting special cases in the history however.

• In Kanchanaburi Province the name Sangkhla Buri was originally given to the district Thong Pha Phum, but in 1939 the name was reassigned to the neighboring district.
• In Ubon Ratchathani Province the district Si Mueang Mai was originally named Khong Chiam, as it was the successor of the Mueang Khong Chiang. The historical location of that Mueang was split off as a minor district named Ban Dan in 1959. In 1971 the name Khong Chiam was reassigned to the newer district Ban Dan.
  
• Something similar must have happened in Chiang Rai Province, where the minor district Chiang Saen Luang was renamed to Chiang Saen in 1939, while at the same time the district formerly known as Chiang Saen became Mae Chan.
• In Narathiwat in 1939 the district Tomo was renamed to Waeng, and the name Tomo was given to the neighboring minor district Bacho (not to be confused with the Bacho in the north of Narathiwat, which is spelled differently in Thai).
  

There are also cases where a district name was later reused.

• The district Lamphun was located in Surat Thani Province, and was renamed to Ban Na and later Ban Na San. Not to be confused with Mueang Lamphun district, which has the additional word Mueang in its name. There is also the district Ban Na in Nakhon Nayok, I don't know yet when that one received its current name.
  
• In Trat Province, the district Laem Ngop was named Ko Chang till 1939. The present-day district was created in 1994.
• The district Si Songkhram in Nakhon Phanom Province was originally named Akat Amnui, which is now a new district in Sakon Nakhon Province.
• Ban Lat in Phetchaburi was named Tha Chang till 1939, the name is now given to a district in Saraburi
  

These are probably still not all the cases where a district name may be ambiguous when considering historical district names, when I find more later I will blog on those.

Missing Geocodes

The list of geocodes contains several obsolete geocodes, most of them are the codes of the districts (and their constituent subdistricts) of the provinces Sa Kaeo, Amnat Charoen and Nongbua Lamphu before these were created. For the subdistricts almost all the obsolete codes are those for minor districts created after the original geocode table was created. But there are a few cases where a geocode is missing for other reasons. I already could find the right answer for two cases - in Khura Buri and Thung Si Udom one of the subdistricts was reassigned to a different district, for Khura Buri the historical center of the district, for Thung Si Udom the subdistrict was included when the minor district was created, but one year later this was reverted.

The other cases where geocodes are missing are not so clear:

• In Pa Bon the missing number should belong to a subdistrict created between 1987 and 1991, and the population numbers at DOPA list this subdistrict (without a name) for the 1993 statistics. But no trace in the Royal Gazette for a subdistrict creation or abolishment
• In Mueang Nakhon Si Thammarat two subdistricts are missing, which seem to be named Sala Mi Chai (ศาลามีชัย) and Na (นา). But still haven't found the year they were abolished, and to which subdistrict they are added.
• Other ones I haven't investigated in detail yet are in Mae Sai, Phon, Mae Sariang, Phu Luang, Kaeng Khoi and Pa Daet, each have a single number missing. I don't recall to had any unknown subdistrict in the populations numbers till 1993, so if these numbers belong to an abolished subdistrict this must have happened before 1993.

District data to XML

I am right now at the Microsoft TechEd in Barcelona, mostly for learning about the new technologies for my job as a programmer. But hearing loads of talk about useful new things around XML, and because I haven't yet had the time to learn much about how to create and use XML so far, the idea of converting the spreadsheet collecting the data into a set of XMLs. Apart from learning XML in much more details than before, it will also allow me to collect data which does not fit into the simple spreadsheet type, and also create small tools querying the XMLs, e.g. to find all the territorial changes related with one district - minor districts split off, single subdistricts getting reassigned and so on. Right now I think the first thing to do is to collect all those Royal Gazette references into one list, saving what they are about, which entities affected... Then the first bigger task would be convert the small application I created to parse the population data websites of DOPA and convert them into the tambon tables in the Wikipedia articles to actually use a much smarter data structure, both for saving the data as well as internally.

District geocodes

The Department of provincial administration (DOPA) uses a list of geocodes for each of the provinces, districts and subdistricts, modeled after the ISO 3166-2 codes of the provinces. Newly created entities get a number following the existing ones of course, though not necessarily in the same order as the official creation as the geocode already gets assigned when the district is in the planning phase. However when that list was started, the numbers of the then-existing districts wasn't created in a simple alphabetical order, or in creation order.

Minor districts were a partial subordinate of the district from which they were created, so in official texts they are referenced as "King Amphoe ..., Amphoe ..., Changwat ...". For the same reason they got assigned a number directly following their master district. Thus with the oldest new districts added at the end of the geocodes instead of directly after the master allows it to date when this geocode list was started. Chai Buri, created in 1981, got the 8418, but Phunphin (the 8417) wasn't its master, so these geocodes were started around 1980 already. Minor districts created in 1978 however are sorted after their master district.

The odd thing about this timing is the fact that the first draft of the ISO 3166-2 standard with geocodes for the provinces of 1988 was based on the US-created FIPS, and not the apparently already existing codes from DOPA. Also in the 1990 census a different geocode system was used, but for the 2000 census the DOPA system was also adopted by the census department. The ISO standard was officially published in 1993, then based on the DOPA system. Also in the 2000 census the DOPA geocodes were used.

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.