Damrong Rajanubhab (1862-1943), major reformer of Thailand's education and provincial administration, historian, and leading intellectual.

Prince Damrong was a son of King Mongkut by a lesser wife and was but a child when his older half-brother Chulalongkorn came to the throne in 1868. He attended the special school the king founded for his younger half-brothers in the early 1870s, worked in various palace offices, and entered the Royal Pages' Bodyguard Regiment in 1877, becoming its commander three years later when only eighteen. In the early 1880s he took on the administration of a succession of new government and military schools in addition to helping organize the modern army. He became deputy commander-in-chief of the army in 1887 and, at the same time, director and minister-designate of the Department of Education. In 1891 he represented the king on a tour of Europe and South Asia and returned to Siam expecting to be appointed the new minister of education in the government reorganization of April 1892. To the surprise of all, including the prince, he was named minister of interior, charged with supervising the complete overhaul of provincial administration in the face of dangerous Western (especially French) expansionism.

Within a few years, Damrong completely changed the methods by which the provinces were governed. He created a completely new central bureaucracy staffed with the graduates of modern educational institutions, consolidated provinces into eighteen administrative "circles," instituted tight budgeting and fiscal controls, introduced modern laws, and promoted public works and social services. He drastically reduced provincial autonomy—which often had amounted to anarchy—and instituted the rule of law. More than any other figure in the government, he worked for social change, opening public office to men of talent irrespective of their social origin. When other organs of government proved unable to work effectively in the provinces to reorganize the Buddhist monkhood and introduce mass primary education, Damrong's Ministry of Education took on the tasks. Throughout the rest of the reign, to 1910, Damrong was, with his half-brothers princes Wachirayan and Devawongse, one of the king's most valued advisers and servants, as well as the most powerful man in the kingdom next to the king.

Damrong found working under his nephew King Vajiravudh difficult and resigned his ministry in 1915. Thereafter he threw himself fully into work as director of what ultimately were to become the National Library and National Museum. He wrote extensively on every aspect of Thai history, literature, culture, customs, and arts and promoted the practice by which books were distributed at funeral ceremonies in honor of the deceased—a practice that brought most of Thailand's literary heritage into print for the first time. He usually wrote a biography of the deceased for the book. He is revered as the father of history in Thailand, but he is also the father of modern administration, modern medicine and hospitals, and schools.

Prince Damrong fled to exile in Penang (Malaya) after the 1932 coup that ended the absolute monarchy; he died there in 1943.