Monday, November 7, 2011

Muban of Bangkok

While looking at the flood maps provided by Longdo to check whether my wife's house escaped inundation, I spotted placemarks for village headmen offices (ที่ทำการผู้ใหญ่บ้าน) in Taling Chan district. Some time ago, I already wrote about a similar office further west in Thawi Watthana district, since to my knowledge the administrative villages within Bangkok were already abolished by 2005.

Actually, I had seen the sign in front of that specific office many times already while driving past it, but never stopped there for a short photo. No name is given for that village, only that it is village 10 of Bang Phrom subdistrict, so I got curious and tried to find at least how many villages each of the subdistricts actually has. Only thing Google returned was an obscure Excel sheet from the Ministry of Education, which contains the geocodes of the villages and several columns of numbers - if I guess right it is the number of children for the ages 0 to 20. And it also contains the strange Muban 77 and 78, so these are really the administrative villages I was looking for.

According to that sheet, there are a total of 810 administrative villages - a bit more than the 279 which in 2005 still had headmen. There are also some strange numbers, for example Don Mueang subdistrict only has the villages number one, four, five and eleven, and the newly created Sanam Bin subdistrict only village nine. The fact that Sanam Bin is already inside this sheet shows that it is rather up-to-date, therefore these villages are still existing at least for statistical or registration purposes.

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