Kanchanaburi

The district has been settled since prehistory: Neolithic burials excavated at Ban Kao gave their name to a culture of the river valleys, and the Khmer built the walled temple town of Mueang Sing on the Khwae Noi. For Ayutthaya the area was a frontier, and the Three Pagodas Pass at the head of the province was the route by which Burmese armies marched into Siam. Kanchanaburi was founded as a defensive outpost at Lat Ya under King Rama I, and moved about sixteen kilometres south-east to the meeting of the two rivers under Rama III, where a walled centre with a brick gate was built.

Its modern fame comes from the Second World War. The Japanese army built a railway from Ban Pong in Thailand to Thanbyuzayat in Burma, finished in 1943, using Allied prisoners of war and a far larger number of conscripted Asian labourers. Kanchanaburi held some of the largest camps, and the steel and wooden bridges over the Khwae Yai just north of the town became the line's best-known point. Disease, hunger, overwork and violence killed around 12,000 Allied prisoners and more than 90,000 civilian labourers along the whole line. RAF aircraft bombed the bridges at Kanchanaburi on 13 February 1945.

After the war the line beyond Nam Tok was lifted, the dead were gathered into war cemeteries and the bridge was repaired with Japanese reparations. Pierre Boulle's 1952 novel and the 1957 film that followed made the River Kwai a name known worldwide, and in 1960 the stretch of the Mae Klong under the bridge was renamed the Khwae Yai to match. Tourism, sugar cane, dams on the Khwae rivers and, more recently, Bangkok weekenders have shaped the town since.

Kanchanaburi lives with a difficult history in public view. The two Commonwealth cemeteries are maintained to a uniform standard, and services are held at the main cemetery and at Hellfire Pass on Anzac Day in April, attended by Australians, New Zealanders, British, Dutch and Thai residents. Visitors whose relatives died on the railway still come, and local museums and guides treat the subject as a matter of record rather than spectacle. The annual bridge festival, with its light and sound show, sits awkwardly alongside that remembrance for some visitors.

The province is more ethnically mixed than central Thailand. Mon communities live along the border and around the reservoirs, Karen villages lie in the western hills, and there are Lao and Chinese-Thai families in the town. Thai Buddhism is the common ground: cave temples in the limestone cliffs, forest monasteries in the hills, and merit-making at Songkran and Loi Krathong, when floats go onto the rivers.

Local identity is bound up with the river. Raft houses moored to the bank, floating restaurants that drift with the current on hire, and long-tail boats are part of everyday life rather than tourist props, though the loud floating discos that Thai groups hire at weekends have drawn complaints from riverside residents for years. Away from the water, the pace is that of a provincial market town.

About 31,000 people lived in the town itself at the last published count, with a wider urban area of perhaps twice that and around 900,000 in the province as a whole. The town is the provincial capital, so government offices, a hospital, schools and a university campus provide much of the steady work, alongside tourism.

The provincial economy rests on sugar cane, cassava, maize and rice grown on the plain, on sugar mills and quarries, and on the hydroelectric dams upstream on the Khwae Yai and Khwae Noi. Tourism is concentrated in the town and at the waterfalls, with weekend traffic from Bangkok and day trips that combine the bridge with the floating market at Damnoen Saduak. Many labourers on farms and building sites are migrants from Myanmar, and the border trade is a constant feature of provincial life.

Days begin early, with markets before dawn and the cemeteries quiet in the cool of the morning; by the middle of the day the heat empties the streets, and evenings belong to the night market and the riverside. Current issues include water management in a valley of dams and irrigation canals, drought in hot years, road accidents on the highway to Bangkok, and the pressure of weekend tourism on the riverbank.

Kanchanaburi eats what the rivers and the surrounding fields provide. Freshwater fish — snakehead, catfish and the large pla khang — are steamed with lime and chilli, fried with garlic or grilled in a salt crust at riverside restaurants, and river prawns are grilled over charcoal. Bamboo shoots, banana flower, young jackfruit and forest vegetables from the hills go into curries and soups, and tom yum made with river fish is a local standard.

The old town's food is central Thai: boat noodles and pork-bone soups, khao mu daeng, red pork over rice, grilled chicken with sticky rice, and curries ladled over rice from trays at the market in the morning. Mon communities in the province contribute khanom jeen, fermented rice noodles eaten with curries, and Burmese-influenced dishes appear near the border.

Sugar cane is the crop of the plain, and sugar in various forms is sold along the roads, along with dried fruit and preserved vegetables. Local sweets include coconut and palm-sugar puddings and khao lam, sticky rice with coconut milk roasted in bamboo tubes, bought at roadside stalls on the way to and from Bangkok. The riverside bars serve cold beer and fresh fruit shakes, and the night market is the cheapest place to eat well.