Lao Mueang administration

The article Administrative reforms and national intergration: The case of the northeast by Paitoon Mikusol (ไพฑูรย์ มีกุศล) (in: Regions and national integration in Thailand, 1892-1992) gives an interesting view on the two different styles of administration in the mueang before around 1900 and the changes during the thesaphiban reforms.

In northeastern Siam, the mueang had two different systems of their internal administration, one in use for the Lao mueang and another one for those under more Siamese control. The Lao system was introduced by the first chao mueang (governor) of mueang Tung, the precursor of present-day Suwannaphum district in southern Roi Et province. Several mueang were grouped into one principality named hua mueang (หัวเมือง, lit. head town), either for group of mueang of a specific ethnic group, or for one major mueang with its subordinate mueang.

The internal administration of each mueang was headed by the chao mueang (เจ้าเมือง), which can be translated as governor or lord. This post, though it was to be appointed by the King in Bangkok, was in fact an hereditary post of the local nobility. Usually the chao mueang had the rank of a Phra (พระ) or Phraya (พระยา). The second post was the uparat (อุปราช), normally the son or younger brother of the chao mueang, and the heir when the chao mueang died. Two further posts are the ratchawong (ราชวงศ์) and ratchabut (ราชบุตร), with the whole group of four posts named aya si (อาญาสี่). All three lower posts were appointed from the court in Bangkok, and were not under control of the chao mueang. Also the capital punishment was not in the authority of the chao mueang, but in many other fields he was quite independent in his administrative decisions.

This system ceased to exist with the thesaphiban reforms during which the local nobility was replaced by paid officials sent from the capital. At least this was the case in those parts which stayed under Siamese rule, what happened in the areas east of the Mekong which were included into French Indochina I have no idea.

The Siamese style of mueang administration will be the topic of a later post.

The Administrative and Political Structure of Chiang Mai Province

On August 12 2008 Dr. Tanet Charoenmuang (ธเนศวร์ เจริญเมือง held a talk at the Informal Northern Thai Group (INTG) on the administrative structure of Chiang Mai province. A bit late they now added a summary of this talk on their website. In fact, it was this talk which made me notice this INTG, as I stumbled on the then scheduled talk while researching about Dr. Tanets book "Thailand - a late decentralizing country". I still don't have the book however, still hesitate to buy it at the only Internet bookstore with a 50% surcharge for shipping.

The Informal Northern Thai Group is a group of mostly foreigners in Chiang Mai, who regularly convene for invited talk on various Thai topics. It is no formal club or foundation, in fact it was one before but was closed in 1975 due to various reasons like time constraints of the original panel members. They are now doing a monthly informal meeting with an invited talk, by now already over 300 talks had been held. If I were living in Chiang Mai, I would probably be a regular guest at these meetings, especially the quite unusual special topics make it very interesting.

Back to the actual talk, which coincides a lot with the topics covered in the book. As the book comprises essays and papers written by Dr. Tanet over the past two decades on the topics, it seems that the summary refers to things which had changed long time already - so it is more a summary of the book than of the talk itself. For example in the decentralization strategy the following points are listed

1. To hold governors’ elections, starting in major provinces and later proceeding to all provinces.
2. To abolish the PAO because it overlaps with the Tambon Council.
3. To replace the council system of Municipality with a strong executive system in which both the mayor and councilors are directly elected by the people.
4. To abolish the Sukapiban system and replace it with the strong executive system of Municipality.
5. To set up a full-fledged local government agency in each Tambon. The people should decide if they prefer the council form, committee form or the strong executive form of government.
6. To oppose the Interior Ministry’s plan to maintain the council form of municipal system.
7. To maintain the regional administrative system for the present and gradually transfer government officials under it to operate under the authority of local government agencies.

The Sukhaphiban were already abolished in 1999, the "local government agency in each Tambon" has been created 1996-1999 with the creation of the TAO. Also, the municipal mayors and councilors are now directly elected. However, the first two points are still unchanged, the province governors are still appointed by the Ministry of Interior, the the PAO with their overlapping responsibilities with the TAO are still in place.

Collection of administrative office locations

For some time already I have added the geographical locations of the administrative into the XML files of my Tambon coding project. Now I have programmed a simple conversion of these XMLs wit locations into a KML file used in Google Earth, so I can easily display all the coordinates I have collected already.

In the map below is always the current version, which at the time of writing includes

• Province halls (blue marker), 65 out of 75
• District offices (green marker), 591 out of 927 (including those in Bangkok)
• PAO offices (red marker), 10 out of 75
• TAO (white marker), 74 out of 2105
• Municipalities (yellow marker), 99 out of 5671

View Larger MapThe placemarks right now have no contents except the coordinates, unlike the one from an earlier experiment where I embedded photos and Wikipedia links, but for now I have concentrated on the essential things.

Quite obviously the coordinates are for from complete - for the district offices I have locations for all and only omitted those where Google Earth has no hires data yet to verify the accurate location. But especially for the municipalities and TAO these are quite difficult to find - some are from WikiMapia, for Samut Prakan Richard Barrow collected a few, rarely the website of the local government unit has a decent map which allows the identification in Google Earth.

So I can only call everyone interested to help making this collection more complete. You can send me any addition or correction by email, or if you have a lot and don't mind the XML editing you can join in the coding project and edit the XML yourself.

Provincial seal stamp series, 4th part

The 4th series of the stamps featuring the provincial seals is out since September already, and now the First Day Cover blog has featured the envelopes.

• Posting 1: Phuket, Maha Sarakham, Mukdahan, Mae Hong Son, Yasothon
• Posting 2: Yala, Roi Et, Ranong, Rayong, Ratchaburi

As I will buy this stamps in my next trip, the one depicted above showing the seal of Nakhon Si Thammarat is from an earlier series.

Strange Muban

While googleing for websites of the local government units, to add the weblinks into my XMLs as well as working through the village lists where I can find them, this respective list on the site of the TAO Kham Thale So (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลขามทะเลสอ), Kham Thale So district, Nakhon Ratchasima province, where I noticed something out of the normal.

The table read as following:

พื้นที่	หมู่ที่	จำนวนประชากร			จำนวน ครัวเรือน
		ชาย	หญิง	รวม
บ้ายขามทะเลสอ	1	231	233	464	120
บ้านหนองคู	2	78	67	145	92
บ้านสีจาน	3	4	5	9	8
บ้านหนองขุ่น	4	14	13	27	16
บ้านโคกแฝก	5	574	561	1,135	273
บ้านโคกสะออน	6	181	181	362	94
บ้านพวงพยอม	7	88	81	169	64
บ้านน้อยพัฒนา	8	143	148	291	71
บ้านบึงขามทะเลสอ	9	145	136	281	72
หมู่ 77		10	8	18	1
หมู่ 78		6	13	19	1
รวม		1,474	1,446	2,920	812

The strange thing in this table is not the low population number in village 3 and 4 - this is simply because those two villages (and also number 2 and 7) are partly covered by the municipality Kham Thale So (เทศบาลตำบลขามทะเลสอ), the strange thing are those two entries titled หมู่ 77 and หมู่ 78 (Village 77 and 78), each with one household. Both have no village number, but apparently aren't part of any of the other villages either. The village detail pages including maps don't have any details on these two entities, nor are they present in the Muban list from DOPA. And the above table is the only place on the website which mentions these two entities. So I have no idea what they are about.

Though I have not much hope to ever get any answer, I tried to raise this question in the forum of the website, which apart from a few spam postings seems to be dead.

Municipal decisions for August 3 2009

Meeting number 34 of board 1 from August 3 2009 with 2 TAO upgraded to subdistrict municipalities.

• Bua Khao, Kuchinarai district, Kalasin province, effective on July 31 2009, upgraded and renamed to Kuchinarai (เทศบาลตำบลกุฉินารายณ์), to avoid confusion with the municipality Bua Khao (เทศบาลตำบลบัวขาว). The TAO was created in 1996, covers 67 km², 16 villages and 7,979 citizen.
• Kut Khao (เทศบาลตำบลกุดค้าว), Kuchinarai district, Kalasin province, effective July 31 2009. The TAO was created in 1996, covers 18.50 km², 8 villages and 4,155 citizen.

2nd birthday of blog

This blog now exists for two years, and again my worrying that I would run out of topics was strongly rebutted. In fact, I currently have so many topics that I have pre-written postings for two months, only leaving spaces for the current news like fresh announcements in the Royal Gazette. And of course a big number of postings thanks to the many new municipalities, in contrast to what I expected for this year, helped to enable me to write a posting every day, I even had to post some on the weekend to reduce the queue.

Whereas the Google hits have more-or-less stagnated at 650 a month in the last year, the number of readers using the RSS feed (or subscribing by email) reached a maximum of 100 subscribers according to feedburner which is way beyond what I expected before for such a technical and obscure topic. Though I guess most of my readers aren't as deep into the topic as myself, I can only repeat my invitation from the last birthday posting of using the comment function to interact, even if only to thank me for presenting something not found in the non-Thai web beforehand.

But it's of course not that I get no feedback at all, and I even got into contact with a few interesting people by this blog already, like an academic working with the Thai census data who could use the tabular data collected in the spreadsheet very well. In return, her questions let me look once again through the geocodes used in the past censuses and notice new facts I previously overlooked.