Exploring Hidden Thailand

For history buffs, the name Kanchanaburi may conjure up images of the Death Railway Bridge immortalized by the book (and later film) called The Bridge Over the River Kwai. Four kilometers north of the province's eponymous capital city, a railway bridge spans the Khwae Yai River. During World War II, the Japanese occupying force used prisoners of war and local coolies to builde this bridge and the 415-kilometer railway that ran over it between Thailand and Burma. More than 16,000 POWs and 100,000 local laborers are thought to have died in the process. The morbid details of the Death Railway Bridge are memorialized at a railway museum, two Allied War Cemeteries (in Kanchanaburi just north of the city, and in Chung Kai across the river and to the southwest), and the JEATH War Museum.