Kanchanaburi

Where it sits. Kanchanaburi is a provincial town of about 30,000 people some 130 kilometres west of Bangkok, at the point where the Khwae Noi and Khwae Yai rivers join to form the Mae Klong. The province behind it climbs towards the Tenasserim Hills and the Myanmar border, a landscape of limestone, teak and reservoirs, and the town itself is strung along the river with floating restaurants and raft guesthouses moored to the bank. It is close enough to Bangkok for a day trip and interesting enough to deserve three.

The railway. In 1942 the Japanese army began building a 415-kilometre railway from Ban Pong in Thailand to Thanbyuzayat in Burma, to supply its forces without exposing shipping to Allied submarines. British engineers had surveyed the route decades earlier and rejected it as impractical. It was built in about sixteen months, by hand, using roughly 60,000 Allied prisoners of war — British, Australian, Dutch and American — and some 200,000 conscripted Asian labourers from Malaya, Burma, Java and Thailand. Cholera, dysentery, malaria, malnutrition and beatings killed more than 12,000 of the prisoners and, by most estimates, between 80,000 and 100,000 of the Asian workers, whose deaths were recorded far less carefully. The line was completed in October 1943 and was in service for less than two years.

The bridge, and the film that renamed a river. Two bridges were built at Tha Ma Kham, just north of the town: a temporary wooden trestle and, alongside it, a permanent steel-and-concrete structure whose curved truss spans were dismantled in Java and shipped in. Allied aircraft bombed both repeatedly in 1945 and destroyed the central spans of the steel bridge. After the war two angular replacement spans were supplied as part of Japanese reparations, and they are still there — the bridge you walk across today has rounded original trusses at each end and squared-off post-war spans in the middle, an easy detail to read once you know it. The famous name is a mistake that stuck. Pierre Boulle's 1952 novel and David Lean's 1957 film placed the bridge over the River Kwai, but the crossing here was over the Mae Klong; in 1960 Thailand resolved the confusion by renaming that stretch of the Mae Klong the Khwae Yai. It is also worth saying plainly that Lean's film was not shot here at all: the bridge blown up on screen was built on the Kelani River at Kitulgala in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Survivors have criticised the film's portrayal of collaboration by the fictional Colonel Nicholson as a distortion of what prisoners actually did.

What you actually see today. The bridge carries a working single track, and visitors walk the sleepers between passing places, stepping onto refuges when a train comes. Trains still run from Bangkok to Nam Tok along the surviving 130-kilometre section, crossing the bridge and then the Tham Krasae trestle, a wooden viaduct pinned to a cliff above the Khwae Noi that is the most affecting stretch of the whole line. Three museums cover the history at different levels: the Thailand–Burma Railway Centre, opened in 2003 opposite the main cemetery, is the serious, well-documented one; the JEATH War Museum, in a reconstructed bamboo hut beside the river, is older and rougher; the Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre, 80 kilometres north and funded by Australia, sits above the Konyu Cutting, where prisoners hacked a 500-metre trench through rock by hand and lamplight, and a walking trail runs the old formation.

The cemeteries. Kanchanaburi War Cemetery on Saengchuto Road holds 6,982 graves, laid out in flat lawns by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and maintained immaculately; Chungkai War Cemetery, across the river on the site of a former prisoner camp, holds 1,693 in a quieter setting. American dead were repatriated. There is no comparable memorial to the Asian labourers, whose names were largely never recorded, and that absence is itself worth noticing.

Getting there and timing. Trains leave Bangkok's Thonburi station twice daily for Nam Tok via Kanchanaburi, taking around two and a half hours to town; buses run from the Southern and Mo Chit terminals; by car it is roughly two hours on Highway 323. November to February is dry and cool and coincides with River Kwai Bridge Week, an annual festival in late November and early December with a light-and-sound reconstruction of the bombing. March to May is very hot. The town, museums and cemeteries are broadly manageable for wheelchair users; the bridge decking, the Hellfire Pass trail and the raft houses are not.