Kanchanaburi War Cemetery

Kanchanaburi Allied War Cemetery is a Commonwealth War Graves Commission site in Kanchanaburi town, maintained by the commission to the same immaculate standard as its cemeteries in Europe and the Pacific. The cemetery holds the graves of 6,982 Allied prisoners of war — primarily British, Dutch, and Australian — who died during the forced construction of the Thailand-Burma Railway between 1942 and 1943. A total of over 12,000 Allied POWs and an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Asian labourers died during the railway's construction along 415 kilometres of jungle terrain. The Kanchanaburi cemetery contains only a fraction of the dead; the remainder are buried at the smaller Don Rak cemetery nearby and at the Chungkai War Cemetery 4 kilometres from town at the site of a major POW camp. The headstones at Kanchanaburi are laid in orderly rows across manicured lawns, each bearing the name, rank, regiment, age, date of death, and often a short personal inscription chosen by the family. The inscriptions — ranging from quietly devastated to darkly stoic — document the individual cost of the railway project in a way that statistics cannot. Many of the dead were in their teens and early twenties. A pavilion at the entrance provides historical information and a visitor register. No admission fee is charged. The cemetery is managed in conjunction with the broader JEATH War Museum and the Bridge on the River Kwai, each located within a few kilometres.