Postal codes for Bueng Kan

The Thai Post has officially announced the postal codes for the new province Bueng Kan now. Not surprisingly, they all use the same prefix 38 as the TIS1099 province code, and to make the transition from Nong Khai postal codes to Bueng Kan postal codes as easy as possible, only the central part of Bueng Kan got a completely new number, whereas for all other areas only the prefix was exchanged. In detail this gives the following table.

Area	Old code	New code
Mueang Bueng Kan, Bung Khla	43140	38000
Seka	43150	38150
So Phisai	43170	38170
Phon Charoen	43180	38180
Pak Khat	43190	38190
Si Wilai	43210	38210
Bueng Khong Long	43220	38220

Chumchon with a different name

Some time ago I systematically searched for websites for all of the local government units, and since then occasionally revisit some in order to check the URL is still valid, a new mayor gets listed, or some data I did not spot in the first round worth adding into my XML. One of these revisited websitesd was the one of Khun Yuam subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลขุนยวม) in Mae Hong Son province. The interesting part is on the page where the municipality gives information on its subdivision, the boroughs (ชุมชน, Chumchon). While they only list the names without any numbering - so I cannot guess the geocodes to add them into the XML - the sentence introducing them says

เทศบาลตำบลขุนยวมแบ่งการบริหารงานออกเป็น 8 ชุมชน หรือ 8 ป๊อก คำว่า "ป๊อก" หมายถึง ชุมชน โดยมีการบริหารงานกันเองในชุมชน Khun Yuam subdistrict municipality is divided administratively into 8 boroughs or "pok". The name "pok" means boroughs which have an personal administration in the borough.

Rather interesting is also the location of the administrative offices in that subdistrict. Whereas the municipality office is located in the middle of the municipality, a bit strage is the fact the the TAO Khun Yuam has its office just 300 meter away, well within the municipal area (see Panoramio for some photos of it). And, unlike many of the municipalities near the district office, in this case the district office is located outside the municipality - in many cases district office and municipality office are directly next to each other and form the center of the municipality. So I am doing a nice little map again to show the approximate borders of the municipality. Sadly the map in the 1956 announcement to create the sanitary district is more like a sketch map than correctly scaled, so I can only guess that the district office back then was located very close to where it now has the municipality office.

View Khun Yuam in a larger map

Photo albums of administrative offices

Khanom District Office, Nakhon Si Thammarat

For some time I already had started with uploading my photos of the various administrative offices on various web 2.0 sites, but never made it a systematically and complete yet, and never could decide which one to use - Picasa, Panoramio or Flickr, or also Wikimedia Commons. But as with the start of Google+ (thanks to Rikker I am online there already) Picasa effectively dropped their quota and made all images of less than 2048 pixel free - so I can now use that image storage without ever worry about running out of space. I have already uploaded some new photos to the albums below, but still have to go through my archive to complete the albums.

Province Halls	ศาลากลาง	Album
District Office	ที่ว่าการอำเภอ	Album
Province Court	ศาลจังหวัด	Album
Municipal and TAO offices	สำนักงานเทศบาล/สำนักงานอบต	Album
PAO offices	สำนักงานอบจ	Album
City Pillar Shrines	หลักเมือง	Album

The photos are all cc-by-sa, the same license as photos on Wikipedia. So anyone can reuse them, only have to give credit to me as the photographer. And also can upload them to Wikipedia, as I somehow never find the time and mood to fill the more and more bureaucratic forms for a simple upload of a self-created photo.

Local Government and Rural Development in Thailand

Already quite some time ago I spotted the book "Local Government and Rural Development in Thailand" by Marcus Ingle on Google Books as one of the few books mentioning the term "Tambon administrative organization". Sadly, on Google Books all one can see of the book are a few sniplets, but from the keyword cloud the book looked very much on topic with my interests, and the fact that it was from 1974 made it even more interesting to get more of the historical perspective. I usually prefer to add books into my own library, this one seems so rare I never saw it at any antiquarian book sellers, so finally I order it through interlibrary loan.

It's one of the absurdities of the copyright laws that a book which was sold in maybe a few hundred copies for US$3.50 almost 40 years ago cannot be available for free online, even though there is zero commercial value in it by now. And since the author is still alive, it will take at least another 70 years until it finally gets into the Public Domain. As I had to pay a bit for the interlibrary loan, and now did my own scans, OCR and cleanup to a readable digital document, I would have paid some bucks to get an already compiled eBook and save me that manual work. I only hope that Google Books will grow into something which makes such abandoned works much easier accessible - they already have them scanned and OCRed.

Anyway, even though it has just 96 pages, and the focus is on the rural development, this book does contain a lot of interesting facts on the local administration in the 1960s and early 1970s, so once I have studied the text in more detail I'll certainly write up several postings with quotes or redraws of the diagrams from the book. For now, I only post the table of contents, to give you a rough idea of what might show up here in the next months mixed in with the regular coverage.

1. Development Trends
   1. Thailand's Non-Colonial Bureaucratic Heritage
   2. Contemporary Socio-Economic Setting
   3. Rural Sector Development Status
      1. Agriculture Production/Productivity
      2. Income Level/Distribution
      3. General Welfare/Well-being
2. Organizational Arrangements for Rural Development
   1. Thailand's Development Strategy
   2. Rural Development Organization
      1. Central Government Organization
         1. Field Operating Units
         2. Functional Offices
      2. Local Administrative Organization
         1. Formal Local Governing Units
            1. Changwat Administrative Organiza­tion (CAO)
               1. Direct CAO Rural Development Services
               2. CAO Supervision and Financial Support for Local Government Activities
                  1. Tambon Council Committee
                  2. Muban Organization
            2. Sukhapiban (Sanitary District)
         2. Traditional Local-Level Units
            1. Religious Institutions
            2. Rural Associations
      3. Private Sector
   3. Regional Analysis of Local Government Operations
      1. The Central Region
      2. The North and Northeast
         1. Rural Setting
         2. Local Government Functions
         3. Governmental Interrelations
         4. Provision of Rural Development Services
      3. The South
3. Local Government-Rural Development Relationships: The Formulation of Hypotheses and Research Conclusions
   1. Hypotheses
   2. Data Summary and Analysis
   3. Conclusion

More TAO upgrades?

On Friday the Royal Gazette had two announcements containing the constituencies of municipalities, normally the last step of a municipal upgrade or area change. The first of the two contains the constituencies for Wichianburi town, which was just recently upgraded, however the second one is rather surprising. Not only that it was published just two days after it was signed - normally these announcements take about 3 months until they show up in the Gazette, thus often after the election with the newly defined constituencies had been held already - the most notable thing about is the fact that I haven't seen anything about this municipality to exist before.

Tha Khanun (ท่าขนุน) in Thong Pha Phum district of Kanchanburi province covers the area of the subdistrict Tha Khanun outside the municipality Thong Pha Phum, which only covers the area around the district office. The upgrade is neither mentioned in the DOLA list of municipal changes of fiscal year 2011, nor does the website of the TAO mention it in any way. Sadly there are still no board meeting transcripts for this year, so I am left to speculating that this TAO is the first of the upgrades for fiscal year 2012 (which starts in October), and unlike previous cases the Election Commission has prepared the constituencies before the upgrade took place, to allow the municipal elections to take place within the 60 days after the end of term of the TAO council - and not many months later like it would be if the constituencies aren't ready at the time of upgrade, which according to the dates in the Royal Gazette announcement seems to have been the standard case in the previous years.

Sanitary districts 1897-1933

For three years already I buy the latest issue of Rian Thai, an academic periodical featuring short articles on various Tai study topics, published by the Institute of Thai Studies of the Chulalongkorn University. Even though most of the article are either beyond my level of knowledge, or are about topics less interesting for me, at a price of 200 Baht for a 300+ pages book it always contains at least something worth reading. Volume 3 published in 2010 was the first which contains something directly related to the topics I blog about. In the article "Changing Bangkok: The Effects of European Settlers and Their Subjects" by PhD student Malinee Khumsupha (มาลินี คุ้มสุภา) includes a description of the changes in administration in Bangkok in the early 20th century. I am quoting the part directly dealing with the sanitary districts (Sukhaphiban).

[...] In fact, Jacquemyns had recommended these since 1892, but he emphasized them again in 1897, along with the significant document known as The Outline of Scheme for the Creation of Municipality of Bangkok.
Accordingly, even King Chulalongkorn agreed with the recommendations, but he worried about these following problems. Firstly, the absence of political participation experience of the Siamese; secondly, that the Siamese may be forced to pay tax alone because the refusal to pay tax by Europeans and Asiatic subjects who claimed extraterritoriality rights; and lastly, it was not suitable to apply at that time. In spite of the fact that there were some arguments, Sukhaphiban was established by The Sanitary Decree of 1897. However, the adoption of participation did not appear in Bangkok at that time, but eight years later came to terms in 1905. The application of local self-governing was known as Sukhaphiban Hua Muang (Sanitary District) at Tha-Chalom District in Samut Sakhon Province, and was called Sukhaphiban Hua Muang Thambon Tha-Chalom, Changwat Samut Sakhon. Two years following, the Act of Sanitary District was enacted in 1908. Throughout the following years, other sanitary districts were formed in certain major cities, and played a significant role in public services at the local level until the end of the absolute monarchy when the act was modified in 1915 and abolished by the Municipal Act in 1933. The sanitary districts during 1915-1933 increased to thirty six districts for 25 years.

As I know almost nothing about the sanitary district except their names and numbers, even more interesting than the above quoted text are the references given. Especially the 2006 dissertation "Sukhaphiban: Local Administration in Siam 1897-1933" (สุขาภิบาล: การปกครองท้องที่สยาม พ.ศ. 2440-2476) by Maetheepat Jeongwarotai (เมธีพัชญ์ จงวโรทัย) caught my interest, Sadly the only thing in English is the abstract

The objective of this thesis is to study the evolution of "Sukhaphiban" during 1897-1933. Starting from the reign of King Rama V when Western Colonialism became the most serious threat, the king believed that the promotion of civilization was the only way to prevent the nation from being subjected to 'the White Man's Burden'. Thus he launched "Sukhaphiban", local administration systems led by bureaucrats, to 'civilize' his subjects and towns. During the reigns of King Rama VI and Rama VII, the political situations changed significantly. People in increasing number demanded their basic rights and political participation. Soon, Siamese elites realized that "Sukhaphiban" no longer matched the demand. There was a wide discussion among the elites about the idea of "Municipality" a system that would allow local citizens to elect their own representatives. Nevertheless, it was only after the 1932 revolution that this system was truly introduced and implemented

Thanks to a friend working in a Thai university I have the full text of the dissertation now, but as it is a scanned PDF I really have to read it and cannot do the shortcut through Google Translate - so it will take quite long until I can post any interesting details I learned from that dissertation.

Geocodes for Bueng Kan

Somehow I totally missed that DOPA had updated their list of numerical codes already to include the codes for Bueng Kan province and its subdivisions. Though I already guessed that the province will get the code 38, and quite logically the Mueang Bueng Kan district will get the 3801, I had to wait for the list to have the codes for all other districts, subdistricts and the municipalities.

Before starting with the long table, I will already mention the general scheme used in the transfer of the codes from Nong Khai to Bueng Kan. The districts are in the same order as they were in Nong Khai, only obviously the numbers now run continuously from 1 to 8. The same holds for the subdistricts, the old order was used again, only the holes in the previous codes from the creation of new districts were omitted. The only strange thing is the code for the municipality Bueng Kan, which did not get the 3899 I would expect, but 3898. Maybe 3899 is left free for a new municipality to be created including the site of the yet to be built province hall?

Name	Type	Old code	New code
Bueng Kan	Province		38
Mueang Bueng Kan	District	4303	3801
Bueng Kan	Subdistrict	430301	380101
Non Sombun	Subdistrict	430303	380102
Non Sombun	Subdistrict	430303	380102
Nong Kheng1	Subdistrict	430304	380103
Ho Kham	Subdistrict	430305	380104
Nong Loeng	Subdistrict	430306	380105
Khong Kong	Subdistrict	430307	380106
Na Sawan	Subdistrict	430310	380107
Khai Si	Subdistrict	430311	380108
Chaiyaphon	Subdistrict	430314	380109
Wisit	Subdistrict	430316	380110
Kham Na Di	Subdistrict	430318	380111
Pong Pueai	Subdistrict	430319	380112
Phon Charoen	District	4304	3802
Si Chomphu	Subdistrict	430401	380201
Don Na Yang	Subdistrict	430402	380202
Phon Charoen	Subdistrict	430403	380203
Nong Hua Chang	Subdistrict	430404	380204
Waeng Chomphu	Subdistrict	430405	380205
Pa Faek	Subdistrict	430406	380206
Si Samran	Subdistrict	430407	380207
So Phisai	District	4306	3803
So	Subdistrict	430601	380301
Nong Phan Tha	Subdistrict	430602	380302
Si Chumphu	Subdistrict	430603	380303
Kham Kaeo	Subdistrict	430604	380304
Bua Thum	Subdistrict	430605	380305
Tham Charoen	Subdistrict	430606	380306
Lao Thong	Subdistrict	430607	380307
So Phisai	District	4306	3803
Seka	District	4309	3804
Seka	Subdistrict	430901	380401
Sang	Subdistrict	430902	380402
Tha Kok Daeng	Subdistrict	430903	380403
Ban Thong	Subdistrict	430906	380404
Pong Hai	Subdistrict	430907	380405
Nam Chan	Subdistrict	430908	380406
Tha Sa-at	Subdistrict	430909	380407
Nong Thum	Subdistrict	430912	380408
Sok Kam	Subdistrict	430913	380409
Pak Khat	District	4310	3805
Pak Khat	Subdistrict	431001	380501
Nong Yong	Subdistrict	431002	380502
Na Kang	Subdistrict	431003	380503
Non Sila	Subdistrict	431004	380504
Som Sanuk	Subdistrict	431005	380505
Na Dong	Subdistrict	431006	380506
Bueng Khong Long	District	4311	3806
Bueng Khong Long	Subdistrict	431101	380601
Pho Mak Khaeng	Subdistrict	431102	380602
Dong Bang	Subdistrict	431103	380603
Tha Dok Kham	Subdistrict	431104	380604
Si Wilai	District	4312	3807
Si Wilai	Subdistrict	431201	380701
Chumphu Phon	Subdistrict	431202	380702
Na Saeng	Subdistrict	431203	380703
Na Sabaeng	Subdistrict	431204	380704
Na Sing	Subdistrict	431205	380705
Bung Khla	District	4313	3808
Bung Khla	Subdistrict	431301	380801
Nong Doen	Subdistrict	431302	380802
Khok Kwang	Subdistrict	431303	380803
Ho Kham	Municipality	4377	3887
Nong Kheng	Municipality	4379	3888
Wisit	Municipality	4380	3889
Si Wilai	Municipality	4383	3890
Bueng Khong Long	Municipality	4384	3891
Pak Khat	Municipality	4385	3892
Si Phana	Municipality	4386	3893
Tha Sa-at	Municipality	4387	3894
So Phisai	Municipality	4390	3895
Phon Charoen	Municipality	4392	3896
Don Ya Nang	Municipality	4393	3897
Bueng Kan	Municipality	4394	3898

¹ Renamed to Non Sawang on March 3 2011, but still named Nong Kheng in the DOPA list