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The Bridge on the River Kwai has become a tourist mecca. Although its a central focus in the famous movie, its just one of many bridges built by the Japanese, and bombed by the allies.

RIVER KWAI STATION WARNING

You’ve made it to the River Kwai Bridge! But a little warning: If you don’t want to go another hour and a half to Nam Tok, jump out here at this station before the bridge. If you’re taking the afternoon train and don’t have accommodation booked up at Nam Tok, you might need to come straight back yet another hour and a half straight away, and won’t have time to explore up there. The next opportunity to get off the train will be a long way after the bridge and it would be a bit more difficult to get back. Otherwise, the stretch between here and Nam Tok is probably the most scenic and interesting stretch of the trip, and we have some great content for it. Enjoy!

THE BRIDGE

Due to the swelling of certain portions of the rivers due in the monsoon, 9 of the 688 bridges constructed along the Death Railway were were constructed out of steel and concrete. 8 were in Burma, and this is the only one in Thailand. A temporary wooden bridge was also built a short stretch down driver 4 months before.

The bridges were built by the Japanese Railway Engineering Unit, with British, Australian, and Dutch soldiers and civilian Southeast Asian civilians providing slave labour – moving earth and building materials, but not so much providing the crucial engineering knowhow as the film would suggest – much to the resentment of Japanese engineers the world over.

If you recently watched the movie, you may be looking around for the sandy bank and granite rocks of the final scene. In fact, the bridge and the surrounds bears little resemblance to that in the film. When the film’s producer, Sam Spiegel, came out to Thailand to find the shooting locations, he felt that this was a terrible place to shoot a film. It was too flat, and of course, there was already a bridge. He instead went to Sri Lanka – where his wife came from – and found a perfect landscape in Kitulgala outside of Colombo. The bridge in the film was a result of a competition that Spiegel put out for the design of a bridge to be made for the movie, which was won by MIT engineering students. They built that bridge for the shoot, and were determined to blow it up as a train ran over the top of it. The who’s-who of Sri Lanka were invited for the filming of the final pyrotechnic scene, but the dynamite failed to ignite, which left the train careening into a wall on the opposite side of the bridge. It took many weeks to reset the scene, and the spectacular final blast was witnessed by a small handful of local Kittulgala locals.

This real bridge was completed in June 1943, and was blown up – not by well-placed dynamite by courageous SAS, but from the air by Liberator Bombers of the Royal Airforce – in June 1945. It was used by the Japanese for 2 years – it helped to supply the Japanese war effort in Burma, and later helped their retreat. Interestingly, once this bridge was bombed, the temporary wooden bridge made downstream remained as a contingency. Throughout the war, that wooden bridge was bombed and rebuilt of wood 9 times.

This, the bombed bridge, was repaired by the Thais after the war. The angular struts at the beginning of the bridge are in the style of Thai rail bridges you may have seen over earlier river crossings. The curved struts are the original Japanese made of iron brought in from Java.

If you’ve jumped out here, it is worth noting that, it wasn’t for Pierre Boulle’s book, and the subsequent movie, this would simply be bridge Number 277. It is not architecturally more remarkable than those many bridges we have passed, and the many more to come. Ahead there are viaducts, cutouts, and tunnels, each with their own stories of woe stretching all the way to Burma and beyond, and many of these stories would be Japanese. This bridge, and Kanchanaburi, has – for better or worse – become an apt site for spending time learning and reflecting on these stories, and paying respects to those that suffered and died.

THE UNFORTUNATE STATUE

It is clear that Kanchanaburi its bridge has become a place of solemn pilgramage for many of those who feel a connection to those that toiled, fought, and died here, and most Thai people are on board with that. But we cannot escape the fact that the bridge is a magnet for tourist dollars in a part of Thailand that otherwise lacks one. So the interesting decision in 2008 to build an 18m tall marble statue of the Goddess Guanyin amidst a Chinese-signposted amusement park cum buddhist temple must be seen in such a context. And who can blame them – the Chinese tourist dollar is now king; a fresh bloodline into the otherwise anaemic Thai tourism industry. As Rod Beattie, founder of the Thailand-Burma Railway museum, says: “The site is so degraded by vendors there’s little you could do to degrade it further”. Arthur Lane, chairman of the National Ex-Services Association has said that “if someone was trying to blow it up and wants contributions, just send them to me.” I wonder if it would be harder to blow up than the bridge?

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Welcome to Kanchanaburi Town. In it, you’ll find the Allied War Cemetary, and a number of museums.

KANCHANABURI WAR CEMETARY

The Kanchanaburi War Cemetary is the site of the POW camp that the Allied forces lived in. They were required to build their own accommodation out of bamboo and palm leaves.

Colonel Philip Toosey – the man depicted by Alec Guiness in the movie – was placed in charge of the Allied camp that supplied the bridge with labour. Toosey insisted on cleanliness in his camp. There were to be no beards. There was no special officers’ mess or sleeping quarters, so that they could better share their meagre rations. He successfully lobbied the Japanese for better food by claiming it would allow the workers to be more industrious. He also established a canteen where the men could use their salaries to buy certain foods to supplement their diet. He taxed transactions, and used the funds to buy better medical supplies. Compared to the 27% death rate at the other camps along the railway line, only 11 men died at the Camp at Tamakan at the nearby Kanchanaburi War Cemetary.

So what explains all the gravestones in the cemetary? When the bridge was completed, Colonel Toosey was ordered by the Japanese to set up a hospital at the Tamakan camp. Cholera, dissentry, and Beri-Beri was rife further up the rail line, deeper into the jungle and further from fresh water. The sick men were taken down the river on barges to this hospital, where Toosey lost around 6 men every day to preventable diseases. Toosey eventually had 9 doctors and 45 orderlies, but with so little medicines, the situation was often futile. However, a few months after the hospital was set up, a Red Cross delegation visited the camp and connected Toosey to a Thai civilian clandestine group called “The V Organisation”. A Mr. Boon Pong arranged for the smuggling of medicines and money from Bangok. This risky operation resulted in the death rate falling from 6 per day to 3 per week.

KANCHANABURI MUSEUMS

The history of the Thai–Burma railway is explored in of a number of museums in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, the town in which the famous ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ is located.

Three museums are privately owned and managed by Thais. These include the JEATH museum (Japan–England–Australia–Thailand–Holland) situated on the river bank just below the junction of the Kwae Noi and Mae Khlong/Kwae Yai rivers. Managed by a Buddhist temple, Wat Chaichumpol, the museum was created in 1977 to provide information about the railway for early tourists. Taking the form of a POW hut, with bamboo platforms on either side of a long aisle, it houses POW accounts, paintings, newspaper cuttings and objects donated by the local community who during the war traded food for watches, forks and spoons.

The World War II and JEATH Museum located fifty metres from the ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ on Maenamkwai Road, was created by a local businessman Prythong Chansiri in memory of his father who died during the Allied bombing of 1944–45. Using the horrors of war to make a case for peace, this museum combines Thai history and art with an eclectic collection of war weapons and memorabilia.

The third among the Thai museums is a small exhibit in the house of the Thai merchant and member of the Thai underground movement, Boonpong Sirivejjabhand.

The most comprehensive introduction to the building of the railway is offered by the Thailand–Burma Railway Centre, (TBRC) located across the road from the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery in Jaokunnen Road, Kanchanaburi. The TBRC was established in 2003 as the result of several years of passionate research and exploration of the railway by an Australian ex-patriot, Rod Beattie. Beattie has lived in Thailand for over eighteen years and been employed for more than fourteen years by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as Manager of the Kanchanaburi and Chungkai war cemeteries. In these years he has acquired an unrivalled knowledge of the Thai–Burma railway: including its route, camp locations and original cemetery sites in Thailand. In the early 1990s Beattie also played a role in the development of Hellfire Pass and personally cleared the rail track that now forms the walking trail below Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum. The museum provides information on all aspects of the railway’s construction and the multinational workforce used by the Japanese. Its displays include artefacts excavated from POW camps, a three-dimensional representation of the full length railway (with camps sites identified by lights), a recreation of a deep railway cutting, a graphic POW hospital, and a statue of Australian POW Ray Parkin’s famous sketch of two malaria victims supporting a man dying of cholera. The Research Centre is dedicated to researching the history of the railway and individual prisoners of war. It provides information and personal tours for family members seeking answers about the experiences and deaths of their relatives. Its data base is progressively accumulating information on prisoners from the Thai–Burma railway but also from other regions of the Asia–Pacific during World War II. As of 2012, its records cover 105 000 individuals, including more than 25 000 Australians, 55 000 British and 22 000 Dutch, as well as Americans, Canadians, Indians and New Zealanders. Data includes personal information about the prisoner, his period of captivity, where he worked and with which workforce, and, if the POW died, the place, date of recovery of the remains and any known subsequent information. All information is provided to family members on request to the TBRC.

NEW ZEALAND ALLEY

Throughout Kanchanaburi, there are many roads named after the nationalities of those who worked and suffered here. If you have a chance to walk through town, you might see roads named after the Allied nations: England, Australia, Holland, America, and France. But also for those labourers brought in from across Asia: Sri Lanka, Singapore, Nepal, Taiwan, The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, China, Brunei, Pakistan, and even Japan.

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As you reach the end of the central Thai floodplains, you will be meeting the Tennasserim hills.

The hills ahead of you are actually the foothills of the Himalayas. They link through Laos, Burma, and China, all the way to the top of the world – Mt. Everest.

At this part of the journey, the River Kwai bulges into a lake at the beginning of the Tennaserim hills, which divide the flood plains of Thailand from Burma and the Indian Ocean with a range of granite and limestone. Generally, the subtropical rainforest on the Western side will be thicker and more lush from the weather coming from the Indian Ocean, and it will get thicker the further into them you head.

In 2011, a Bell Iroquois helicopter went out looking for illegal loggers from Burma and crashed in these mountains not too far to the south from here. Two days later, a Royal Thai Army Black Hawk that had been sent out to recover five bodies of victims and also crashed. A week later, a third Bell 212 military helicopter also succumbed in this same area. The more scientific blamed the first two crashes on bad weather, and the third on a rotor failure. But the more superstitious Thais blamed the consecutive crashes on the mountain range’s strong and two-faced guardian spirits: on a good day, they are benevolent protector of the riches of the earth and trees, but on bad days they can be trecherous ghosts known to divert and even devour unsuspecting travellers.

Overlooking the lake on the hill behind it are two temples – Wat Tham Faet is on the Bangkok side of the hill, and Wat Tham Mangkornthong on the Nam Tok end. Perched overlooking the lake, these Wats are remarkable because they are the entrances to caves that burrow deep into the limestone hill. These caves are considered holy places deserving an assortment of shrines and gold-covered statues. On a hot day, they can be a cool retreat from Kanchanaburi, and can be reached by a quick taxi ride. In between the caves, you will see an unfortunate scar – a limestone quarry for Thailand’s cement industry.

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On the Death Railway, you’ll be in the floodplain of the Mae Klong, in the greater Chao Phraya floodplain, which is where most of Thailand lives for better or worse.

Once every 2 or 3 years when the river floods over onto the floodplain, a large amount of fine sediment called alluvium is deposited onto the floodplain. The finer and lighter alluvium such as clay and silt drifts further away from the river out into the plains during a flood, and this regular deposit of alluvium is what makes these areas so fertile and suitable for rice cropping.

The larger, heavier, and coarser alluvium such as gravel and sand is deposited closer to the river. This means that After many flood events, raised areas of land, called levees, build up on the river banks. This is what is often preventing you from seeing the Chao Phraya itself, or its tributaries, from the train.

To a large extent, you could consider Thailand a Kingdom defined by the Chao Phraya river system. Its agricultural richness is due to this flooding cycle. Thailand’s borders are in the mountains that skirt its basin. The early trade that made the Ayutthaya kingdom powerful was built on the river’s navigability, and the canals that spread from it helped to transport its levers of power to the neighbouring chiefdoms and kingdoms.

Flooding is a normal and necessary part of life in a floodplains. Yet severe flooding of this floodplain has also been the scourge of modern and developed Thailand. For example, the 2011 monsoon season innundated over 20,000 square kilometers, left Bangkok flooded for around 6 months – killing 815 people and further affecting 13.6 million with almost 50 billion dollars of damage, particularly in the industrial estates on the outskirts of Bangkok. Disrupted supply chains led to a global shortage of hard disk drives, and automobile parts.

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For quite a while on the Death Railway before you reach The Bridge, you might be able to see a river to the South and West – this is the infamous River Kwai… or is it?

The Bridge on the River Kwai is a wonderful Academy Award winning film released in 1957 starring Sir Alec Guiness. It is based on a book by a Frenchman named Pierre Boulle. Boulle was trained in Avignon as an enginneer, which taught him a lot about how to construct bridges. In 1935 he travelled to Malaya to be a rubber planter and when the Japanese came, he was trained as a sabateur, which taught him how to blow up bridges. He was also imprisoned, not by the Japanese, but by the Vichy French in Hanoi, which taught him a lot about being a prisoner of war. So Boulle had a lot of first hand experience which led to him writing such a compelling story. However, he had never been on the Thailand-Burma railway. The novel, and especially the later screenplay, was an amalgamation of his experiences, and the stories he and others heard from Malayan rubber plantation workers that did experience the ordeal first hand.

So we can forgive Boulle for making the slight blunder of geography in the naming of the film. The bridge that the movie is about was actually built on the Mae Klong, which is a river that will be in the middle distance out the left hand side for the next hour or so. The Kwai Noi – meaning Little Tributary in Thai – spills into the Mae Klong about 4km downstream from the Bridge. If you were to continue on the train, you will see plenty of the River Kwai Noi, again out the left hand side, as the train line runs alongside it. But never does the rail cross it. However, in the 1960s, due no doubt in small part to the success of the film, the upper part of the Mae Klong – above where the Kwai Noi joins – was renamed the River Kwai Yai or Big Tributary.

The River Kwai, or the Mae Klong, is also in a famous scene from another Academy Award winning film – the Deer Hunter. The bank of the River Kwai Yai that the first Russian Roulette scene was filmed with Robert Deniero and Christopher Walken. The Thai actor who played the vicious Viet Cong gamemaster was actually recruited from the local Thai village, and was the second choice. The brutal slaps the two hollywood stars endured from the Gamemaster in the scene had to be real, but the first actor couldn’t bring himself to do it. Luckily, they found a man who thought he would enjoy it, and the brutal scene still gives me goosebumps.

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You’re about at a provincial border. The 76 administrative provinces of Thailand often date back to times of chiefdoms and city-states.

Many provinces of Thailand date back to semi-independent kingdoms, which paid tribute to the central Ayutthaya Kingdom. When the modern Kingdom of Thailand began to emerge in the late 1800s, it felt pressure from neighbouring colonial powers who sought to influence the border areas, so the kindgoms and chiefdoms were gradually broken down and drawn under a new administrative apparatus, sometimes with considerable resistance. The railway lines that you’re taking today were actually part of the answer to bringing these wayward provinces into the fold.

There are now 76 provinces arranged around and named after a provincial capital. Son in this intance, you’re crossing between Kanchanaburi Province (which is the next major town to the West, and the Northern tip of Ratchaburi Province (which is the next major town to the South), and you’re not far from Nakhon Pathom province (the next major town to the East).

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To the North of the Death Railway next to the River Kwai is a large industrial cluster, which is as good a time as any to talk about the Thai economy.

A quick romp through Thailand’s economic history suggests that it has always been intimately tied with politics, and further exposed to international politics and economy.

In old Siam, amidst the jungle, coastal ports welcomed merchants from the maritime traders of Arabia, India, and China. In the 14th Century, Ayutthaya, a city a little ways to the north, became a hub of trade with China, making the central Ayutthaya kingdom prosperous and powerful. Trade with China has been a source of economic power ever since, but the 19th century saw the signing of treaties with European countries and the United States that guaranteed privileges for its traders too.

Domestically, serfdom held the economy back until Chulalongkorn abolished the practice in the beginning of the 20th century, and he began linking the country with better trade infrastructure, including the rail line you are now on. Significant investment in education in the 1930s laid the basis of the development of industrial and service sectors throughout the 20th century.

The rest of the 20th century saw the economy become increasingly globalised and intertwined with geopolitics. For siding with the Japanese during the second world war, Thailand was forced to hand over 1.5 million tonnes of rice to Allied countries, which placed a heavy burden on Thailand’s post-war recovery.

However, from the 1960s to the end of the century, Thailand enjoyed relatively strong economic growth despite becoming the frontline for the West’s fight againt communism in Southeast Asia. The manipulation, and particularly devaluation, of the Thai Baht throughout this period led to a boom in exports, which saw Thailand’s market-based economy race up the economic ladder. But it came crashing down in 1997 when foreign speculation put more pressure on the Baht than the Bank of Thailand could handle, triggering the Asian Financial Crisis and the collapse of not only the Thai economy, but the entire regional economy.

Ever since, Thailand’s politics has limped along in a cycle of coups and democratic transitions, which has scared off tourists and investors alike, leaving the economy stagnant and rudderless. The latest Military Junta has declared Thailand 4.0, with an emphasis on investment into innovative and higher-tech businesses. The industrial park we’ve just travelled past is an important compenent of that. It hosts some of the largest food processing companies in Thailand and the world, as well as heavy industry further to the East, and is part of an innovation ecosystem that includes a various universities and government laboratories.

Today, Thailand is the second largest economy in Southeast Asia after Indonesia, and could be characterised as an industrialised and export driven service economy. Although a lot of the economic activity you’re about to see derives from agriculture – and rice cultivation in particular – only about one twelth of its economic output is agricultural. Its much more about automobiles, electronics, synthetic materials, and financial services. Two thirds of its economic output derived from exporting, and although Thailand is one of the world’s biggest exporters of rice, this only makes for 2% of exports.

In 1988, roughly two thirds of Thai people lived below the poverty line. Today, that figure is closer to one in eight. So despite the hiccups, and although there is a long way to go, those statistics show Thailand as one of the great development success stories in the modern era.

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Nong Pladuck Junction is the crossroads where the Japanese began to lay tracks West. One line veers north and run 142km into the rice country around Suphanburi. Then a couple of kilometres further West, the Southern Line splits south down the Isthmus of Kra, running all the way down to Singapore. This is the track of the famed Eastern Orient Express.

There is a 3rd option – the Death Railway. Shortly after Pearl Harbour the Japanese forces found that British Burma was becoming a liability to its conquest of the Eastern Hemisphere. Burma was one of the Allies’ last sources of rubber, an increasingly important wartime commodity, and it was also a back-door to supply the anti-Japanese resistance in China. So, in early 1942, Imperial Japan invaded Burma from the sea and by land over the Tenasserim Range that we’re now heading towards. They installed a puppet regime, and continued North-West to dig into British India.

If it was only that simple. At its peak, the Allied Forces’ Burma Campaign saw around 1 million troops come from aross the British Empire to head off the Armies of Imperial Japan and its puppet regimes. For Imperial Japan, fighting on this front, and keeping control of Burma meant supplying an equally formidable war effort from the East. However, the Tenasserim Range that divides Thailand from Burma, with its hilly topography, rivers, dense jungles and monsoonal climate, made for a terrible supply route. The alternative sea-route via Singapore and the Malacca Strait was long, and made for easy pickings by the Allied Navy. Linking the Thai rail network to the British-built rail network in on the other side of the hills was the only solution. If successful, Japanese-held Burma would turn from a strategic over-reach into a strategic stronghold – one from which to dig further into British India.

So from this important junction, in early 1942, Japan’s Imperial Army started to lay track urgently, and disasterously. Allow me, if you will, to paint a grusome image in your minds to lend perspective to the scale of this undertaking, and the scale of its tragedy: If you laid down PEOPLE down parrallel to these tracks, lining them up head to feet, for the entire 415km of the Death Railway, thats actually about how many people worked on it, against their will. About 240,000. Every 10th person was an Allied soldier, and the other 9 were civilians from across Southeast Asia that were recruited by force to work under the same horrific conditions. Those laying beside the portion of track that still remains today – from here for about 2 hours to the end of the line at Nam Tok: They didn’t make it.

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Nakhon Pathom is a surprise. We really recommend you explore it.

PRA PATHOMACHEDI

Phra Pathommachedi is ancient and monumental… but if you’re looking for records, its probably not QUITE there. Its name means the ‘first holy stupa’. That’s because it was, probably, the first buddhist stupa in Thailand, built somewhere in around 200 to 300 BC – we don’t know exactly. But, Shwedagon Pagoda, only about 500km to the Northeast in Myanmar, is thought to be a wee bit older, and there are many older in the Subcontinent where Buddhism comes from. But its very old indeed.
It was originally built with a more modestly sized dome aligned more with the subcontinental style at the time. It was the Emperor Ashoka that wanted it built as part of his efforts to spread the word of Buddha eastward. However, it was deserted and left to the jungle for hundreds of years before being restored under the orders of King Rama the 4th in the 19th Century. Rama the 4th made a few modifications – he saw it shaped into its pointed shape and megalithic scale, extending the height by around 40 metres, and it now CLAIMS to be the TALLEST stupa on earth… However, the way I see it, at 120.45m its a body’s length shorter than the 122m Jetavanaramaya stupa in Sri Lanka, which is also much more rotund and massive.
So… yeah. Phra Pathommachedi – no doubt ONE OF the world’s great pagodas.

NAKHON PATHOM

Nakhon Pathom is often considered to be the oldest city in Thailand, dated roughly by the original building of the Phra Pathom Chedi – claimed to be the tallest stupa in the world at 120.45m. When the Indian Emperor Ashoka wanted to spread the word of Buddha east, it is thought that the Phra Pathom Chedi was one of the first Buddhist Wats to be built in the whole of Southeast Asia around 200 to 300BC, but we don’t know exactly. To get a better idea of how ancient Nakhon Pathom is, it is worth noting that it was founded as a coastal city – at the mouth of the Tha Chin river, and a trading port between China and India. But the Tha Chin and Chao Praya rivers deposited 50km worth of sediments over the centuries and changed their courses to leave the city without water entirely. Its early population deserted it and the jungle reclaimed it. In the 19th Century, King Rama the 4th ordered the pagoda to be fully restored, a summer palace built, and the area resettled. He built the canal that you have seen alongside the railway to bring back fresh water, agriculture, and to allow his royal barge to get there. Under Rama the 4th’s patronage, Nakhon Pathom has grown into a spiritually, architecturally, and gastronomically rich and diverse city. During the years of Japanese influence, a sprawling fine arts university, Silpakorn university, was built around the King’s palace, founded by the famed Florentine sculptor, Corrado Feroci. The city is also well known for its variety and quality of fruits, and particularly its pomello. If you see someone selling some at the station, its worth the risk.

SANAM CHANDRA PALACE

You can’t quite see from the train, but the Sanam Chandra Palace lies off over yonder. It was a place for the Royal Family to stay when they came to Nakhon Pathom to pay homage to the Phra Pathom Chedi. Built in the 1st decade of the 1900s, it is a bit odd for a few reasons: Its architecture has strong European motifs. This is not uncommon in the palaces of Thai Royalty at the time – King Rama the 6th was an Anglophile and British architectural motifs from various eras can be seen in its facade. Its structure also eludes to defensive intentions. With Thailand being an Absolute Monarchy at the time when that was going out of fashion – the Qing Dynasty had just been overthrown in China, for example – Rama the 6th saw Nakhon Pathom as a strategically located city – a good retreat from Bangkok should there ever be a national crisis. So his palace is a stronghold: Built on high ground on an island surrounded by a moat of canals.

In 1911, Rama the 6th also formed the Wild Tiger Corps – a 4,000 strong personal paramilitary guard, which trained on these palace grounds. The Wild Tiger Corps quickly came to rival the Regular Thai Army, and its esteem with the King caused dissent in the Thai Army’s ranks. It took a coup d’etat and an attempt on the King’s life by a small group in the Thai Army officers in 1912 to convince the King that this was all a bad idea. The Wild Tiger Corps was disbanded soon after.

Another strange sight at the Palace is the statue of a dog that sits in front of it. This is Ya-Le, Rama the 6th’s dog. He was a street dog, but a great dog by all accounts. The King found him while inspecting a prison in Nakhon Pathom. The story goes that the King was so enamoured by the pooch as to cause one person to shoot the poor dog out of sheer envy. The King placed Ya-Le’s life-size bronze likeness in its current honoured position guarding the palace, and penned a poem about him which is inscribed on the statue’s mount.

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Thailand is a country of water, particularly in its floodplains. Canals and bridges have been a major engineering feat.

CANALS

The waterways are such an essential part of Thailand’s developmental story that I would be remiss not to discuss it. You may have seen a canal running along side the track on your right earlier – this forms one of the many links between the Tha Chin river you just crossed, and the great Chao Phraya river which runs through Bangkok. You may see another canal off to your left linking the Tha Chin to the next river, and eventually the River Kwai. There is an incredible latticework of canals criss-crossing the whole of central Thailand’s river basin. Although canals were being dug in Thailand for centuries – mainly to form defensive moats – the nation-building project commenced with the founding of the Royal Irrigation Department in 1908 by King Rama the 5th. The King appointed, as you might guess, a Dutchman – Mr. Yehoman vander Heide – as the irrigation expert to plan out the drainage of the alluvial plain we’re in. The thousands of kilometers of canals, as well as the complex system of thousands of barrages, locks, and pump-houses means, importantly, that the Thai people are better protected from flooding. Although its not fullproof as the floods of 2011 showed – that was the worst flooding in Thailand’s recorded history and profoundly impacted the Thai economy, and even the global economy. These canals can sometimes also be used for transportation, and – unfortunately – they also help dispose of rubbish and waste. Most importantly, they are the life force of Thai agriculture, which is, among many things, now a global superpower in rice. It is hard to imagine such a large and wealthy population living on such a low-lying, monsoonal, and flood-prone piece of real-estate without this impressive network of canals.

BRIDGES

A bit to the East is the Truss bridge over the Tha Chin River.
The Japanese and the quarter of a million people that worked on the Death Railway built around 600 bridges. This bridge is not one of them – its far more sturdy. The Japanese Imperial Army’s construction project began about 40km ahead under much tighter deadlines. This bridge is, however, typical of iron truss railway bridges found throughout Thailand, the vast majority of which were built after the war. Pay particular attention to the angular iron struts you should see out the window as you go past – you’ll see this later.

The river is the Tha Chin – a distributary of the great Chao Phraya river that flows through Bangkok and feeds Central Thailand’s alluvial plain. The Tha Chin splits from the Chao Phraya a couple of hundred kilometres to your right in the North, and meanders it’s own way to the Gulf of Thailand.

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