Aš consists of nine municipal parts (in brackets population according to the 2021 census):[2] The initial name of the settlement was probably Ascha.

The name was derived from the High German words ask (i.e. 'ash') and aha ('water', 'stream'), referring to a stream flowing between ash trees.

With the neighbouring municipalities Hranice, Krásná, Podhradí and Hazlov, it lies in the westernmost area of the Czech Republic known as the Aš Panhandle.

The upper course of the White Elster River shortly after its source flows across the central part of the municipal territory, outside the town proper.

Previously uninhabited hills and swamps, the town of Aš was founded in the early 11th century by German colonists[10] descending from the Bavarian march of the Nordgau in the course of the Ostsiedlung.

[11] The first recorded rulers were the Vogt ministeriales from Weida, Thuringia, who gave the entire Vogtland region its name.

Nevertheless, two years later, they sold Aš land to King John of Bohemia, who since 1322 also held the adjacent Egerland in the south.

Like the neighbouring Egerland, it remained Protestant until the Thirty Years' War, as the Counter Reformation did not stretch to the West Bohemian borderlands.

In 1774, Empress Maria Theresa officially mediatised Aš as part of the Bohemian crown land within the Habsburg monarchy, against the delaying resistance by the Zedtwitz noble family.

Nevertheless, she granted its Protestant citizens freedom of religion, confirmed in the 1781 Patent of Toleration, issued by her son Emperor Joseph II.

[10] Upon the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the end of World War I, a soldiers' council seized power and rejected the demands of separatists from Cheb for annexation to the Bavarian lands of the German Weimar Republic, preferring to remain with the Republic of German-Austria, which was however soon denied by the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

[14] In 1937, the Sudeten German Party took over in Aš, led by Konrad Henlein, who for several years had worked in the town as a gym teacher.

Henlein openly advocated the annexation of the Sudetenland territories to Nazi Germany, while Czech residents, mainly officials, were forced to leave the town.

On 22 September 1938, a few days before the Munich Agreement, a Sudeten German Freikorps proclaimed a "Free State of Asch".

[18] In 1949, 3,000 expellees met in far away Rüdesheim am Rhein, to protest, stating that their area never was inhabited by Slavs other than as a tiny minority.

Under the administration of the museum also operates "The stone crosses research society" which maintaints the central register of these monuments.

[23] Gustav Geipel Memorial from 1924 is dedicated to this factory owner and patron of Aš, who sponsored children, poor and old people.