Last week, DOPA published their annual statistics with the numbers of the various subdivisions. The only changes are in the numbers of the local governments due to some municipal upgrades and merges. Interestingly, no new administrative villages were created last year. Also included in the graphic posted to Twitter and Facebook is the population number. The detailed numbers can be found at stat.dopa.go.th, also there already was the annual Royal Gazette announcement with the numbers by provice. Changwat: 76 Amphoe: 878 Tambon: 7255 Muban: 75086 PAO: 76 Thesaban: 2472 (2450) Thesaban N ..read more

 Last year I sadly neglected this blog quite a bit, at first it was a quiet time, and then a serious sickness kept me from working on this project. In the second half of 2020 a bit more happened on the subdivisions, though I have succeeded to keep my XML as well as the Excel sheet updated, its not yet documented here. So a short list what I have to write about December 20, the Provincial Administrative Organizations had their first elections since 2014, now all have a new chairman as well as councillors. On March 28 2021, the municipality mayor and council elections are planned to take p ..read more

A month ago I noticed that a new external identifier was added to some of the Thai provinces, taken from the GADM subdivision maps. From the rudimentary info on the GADM website - which even does not explain what the acronym is supposed to mean - this seems to be a project to provide maps for the country subdivisions up to the 2nd level. For Thailand it even goes down to the 3rd level, the subdistricts (Tambon). Additionally to the maps, it also defines a unique code for each subdivision. At first look an interesting project. However - the website does not state any author of these maps, nor g ..read more

About two years since the last update, the geocode lists at stat.dopa.go.th have been changed again. Both the central administrative list as well as the registration codes have been modified. The changes to the ccaatt list are the biggest, however this is only because the new list only contains the subdistricts now - provinces, districts and all of the subdivisions of Bangkok have been removed. Apart from these, there is only one real change - the subdistrict Wat Sai in Nakhon Sawan is now spelled วัดไทรย์ instead of วัดไทร. It seems like that old spelling was in fact a mistake in the cc ..read more

The number of municipal upgrades is increasing this year, after it was very quiet for several years. There were none at all in 2016 till 2018, and nine in 2019. The following changes have been announced in the first three months of 2020 - and there are still many more forthcoming. Ban Krot (เทศบาลเมืองบ้านกรด), Bang Pa-In district, Ayutthaya province, upgraded from subdistrict municipality to town [Gazette], effective March 3 Pak Phraek (เทศบาลเมืองปากแพรก), Mueang Kanchanaburi district, Kanchanaburi province, upgraded from subdistrict municipality to town [Gazette], effective March 18 Bang ..read more

When the new province of Bueng Kan was created in 2011, there was one thing which was strikingly different to the previous batch of province creation - the capital of the province wasn't made a town (Thesaban Mueang). When the TIS1099 geocodes were assigned to the districts as well as the municipalities, the usual 99 for the provincial capital was left out, Bueng Kan subdistrict municipality was assigned the code 3898 instead. At that time the actual location of the provincial administrative offices wasn't decided yet, but by now its construction is long completed in the southern part of Buen ..read more

A reader notified me that the Department of Local Administration (DLA) also updated their statistics page with December 20th as its reference date. What was confusing is that the numbers of local government units as of December 31st from DOPA differed from those in the provincial breakdown - but once looking into the XLS file itself it showed that it was only this one HTML page not updated. The interesting things about this update however are more subtile. It was the third time DLA updated that page in 2019 - in June, September and now December. Normally it was only updated once a year with ..read more

The Department of Provincial Administration has published the latest statistics of the numbers of administrative units in Thailand, as of December 31st 2019. The numbers are as follows, with the 2018 numbers in brackets if there were changes. Changwat: 76 Amphoe: 878 Tambon: 7255 Muban: 75086 (75032) PAO: 76 Thesaban: 2450 (2442) Thesaban Nakhon: 30 Thesaban Mueang: 184 (179) Thesaban Tambon: 2236 (2233) TAO: 5324 (5332) Special administrative units: 2 After some years of almost no changes, now there are some new administrative villages, and also the number municipality upgrades have increas ..read more

I have neglected the blog for the past half year - kept myself busy with some other projects on Wikidata, but also not much happened with the subdivisions lately as politics was apparently preoccupied with the general election and coronation. Another reason which made it more difficult to keep up with the news is the fact that my automatic search within the Royal Gazette for interesting new announcements strangely fails most of the time, so i fact I did miss one change to report. And as before, the municipal changes from law.moi.go.th are still hardly accessible, the strange routing problem pe ..read more