WatsWhy the temples here are called Chong
ทำไมวัดแถบนี้ชื่อจอง
In Chiang Mai a temple is Wat Phra That Something. In Mae Hong Son it is Wat Chong Something. The word is Shan.
Christophe95 · CC BY-SA 4.0What it is
A naming pattern that maps the cultural border better than the political one does, and it is visible in the map data.
The long version
Tradition holds — chong or jong (จอง) is the Shan word for a monastery, and it turns up in temple names through Shan country on both sides of the border.
So it should be testable, and it is. Counting the named Buddhist temples in the OpenStreetMap harvest within fifteen kilometres of each town: Mae Hong Son has three of ten carrying the word — Wat Chong Kham, Wat Chong Klang and the pair listed together as วัดจองกลาง วัดจองคำ. Mae Sariang has one, Wat Jong Soong. Khun Yuam has none. Pai has none of seventeen. Chiang Mai has none of three hundred and eighty-two.
Inference — that is a small sample and OpenStreetMap's romanisation is inconsistent, so treat it as a floor rather than a survey. But zero out of 382 in Chiang Mai against three out of ten in Mae Hong Son is not noise, and it is the same line the architecture draws: this province was Shan before it was Thai, and the Anglo-Siamese boundary settlement of 1892–93 moved the border without moving the people.
Which means a rider crossing from Pai to Mae Hong Son is crossing something older than the province, and the temple signboards are where it shows.
Runs with
- watWat Chong Kham and Wat Chong Klang — The two the word is most attached to.
- personThe Shan — Whose word it is.
- watWat Jong Soong — The one in Mae Sariang.
- townMae Hong Son — Where the pattern concentrates.
Named here by
- watWat Hua Wiang — The naming pattern it sits inside.
- watWat Jong Soong — The pattern, and where it thins out.
- watWat Phra That Mae Yen — The pattern this one is an exception to.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | harvested | OpenStreetMap — OpenStreetMap contributors | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- OpenStreetMap — OpenStreetMap contributors
- Shan people — Wikipedia (en)
- Mae Hong Son province — Wikipedia (en)
- Shan State — Wikipedia (en)
cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there