We will never know their names.
We will never know how many nor exactly where they came from.
We can, however, try to tell their story so that they will never be forgotten.
Beneath this obelisk is a vault that contains more than 10,000 sets of remains of Asian Forced Laborers (collectively known by the Japanese term ‘romusha’[1]). They are here because post-war development uncovered hundreds of graves. Because that land had once been part of Wat ThaWorn Wararam, the Abbot Luang Bpo took responsibility for those remains. Over the course of the next few years, three different burial events took place totaling over 10,000 skeletons and ashes.
The cremains were buried here because the playing field opposite the CWGC cemetery was one of the many hospitals operated by the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) during World War II and the area directly opposite this cemetery was the west end of a large encampment for the romusha who, like the Allied Prisoners of War (POWs), were concentrated here after the completion of the Thai-Burma Railway (TBR). Many of those in the camp died there or in that hospital.
The obelisk itself was constructed in 1957 by members of the temple community to mark this place as the “Grave of 10,000 Souls”. The Chinese character used does not denote a specific number but rather just a large number greater than 10,000. It also seems as if there were some additions, renovations done in 1972, but none of this is well documented. Because the identity of the dead was unknown at the time of construction, the chedi became known as Chedi Niranam or grave of the anonymous.
These Asian Forced Laborers were from many nations, brought to Kanchanaburi by the Japanese in 1942-43 to build the Thai-Burma Railway (see Section 2). No one will even know the exact numbers nor the distribution of those nationalities. It is reasonably well documented, however, that the largest group were Tamil-Indians from Malaya. Soon after they conquered Malaya, the IJA was tasked with building the TBR. Hundreds of IJA Railway Engineers were transferred from Malaya to Kanchanaburi. The original plan called for the hiring of workers from the surrounding countries to build that rail link. But the IJA soon realized that they also had some 200,000 Allied POWs who could also become manual laborers. It is generally believed that some 61,000 of those POWs worked the TBR. But the number of romusha totaled between 250 and 500,000[2]! The death rate of the POWs was about 20%; for the romusha closer to 40%.
But the cremains buried in this grave are those of the romusha who survived their work on the Railway. In the months following the completion of the TBR in OCT 1943, the IJA began consolidating all the workers, POWs and romusha alike, to Kanchanaburi. One portion of the POW camp was near the Bridge and others closer to the walled city. The romusha camp was on the opposite side of the SangChuto Road near the cemetery but its precise location is not well documented.
Some existing records suggest that the vast majority of those housed there were Tamils. Added to them were smaller groups of Javanese, Singaporean Chinese and even some Vietnamese. Unlike the Allied POWs buried nearby, there are no cemeteries for the romusha who died working the TBR. No one was keeping records of their names, dates or places of death. Many were never even properly buried. The Japanese were extremely afraid of cholera. They had the bodies of those who died (and in some cases even before they were actually dead) cremated in huge open fires. We know this from reports of POW survivors who the IJA guards forced to collect and burn those bodies.
As with the Allied POWs, deaths among the AFL continued to occur from the accumulated conditions that they experienced in the jungles. Thai witnesses say they would watch the hospital staff open a grave and place as many bodies as died that day into it before closing it at night and repeating the process each day, day after day, week after week.
Even the end of the war in AUG 1945 did not end the suffering of the romusha. Australian, British and US authorities acted extremely fast to move their soldiers to hospitals for examination and treatment and then repatriation as soon as possible. Not so for the romusha! Once again, they found themselves abandoned; unwanted and unassisted. They were on their own. Some stayed in Thailand and established new lives. Others set out on the trek homeward. That trek could take 6-8 months. Many very likely did not survive that portion of their ordeal.
In the 1990s, a group of Malaysian business men gathered together to try to find ways to memorialize the Tamils who died on the TBR. They managed to add a plaque to an existing memorial in Ipoh, Malaysia. Some of these men were sons of romusha survivors who had managed to return after the war. In 2025, this shrine was converted to its present condition after the Abbot gave his consent for this group to renovate the 1957 structure to tell the story of the TBR romusha.
[1] Romusha is used herein as a collective term to encompass all the Asian Forced Laborers of all nationalities who worked these projects.
[2] This figure includes 100,000 plus Tamils who were sent to work the Mergui Road project farther south.
Part 2 = same story from a different perspective
This is Chedi Niranam. It was built in 1957 by the elders of Wat ThaWorn Wararam. Niranam is the Thai word meaning unknown or anonymous.
Its story begins in 1952 when the Thai government began to widen and improve the SangChuto Road. The work crews began to unearth human bones as they dug. Everywhere they worked in the area near the temple, there were bones. Since that land had once belonged to the temple, Abbot Luang Bpo took responsibility for those remains. Over the course of the next few years, different construction projects unearthed more and more bones. Three different burial events took place totaling over 10,000 skeletons (by the count of the temple staff). After a period when no more bones had been found, the burial site was sealed and this chedi was erected. The inscription in Chinese reads: Grave of 10,000 Souls.
It is important to note that even just a decade after the war was over, no one was sure whose bones were buried there. Apparently, no efforts were made to determine the history of what had occurred or how thousands of people had been buried here. Never the less, the Wat ThaWorn Wararam community remained faithful to those remains. Every year, during the Chinese festival of Qing Ming, the temple has held a ceremony of honor and remembrance. But even today, if asked, those performing this ancient ritual will say that do not know who is buried there. There also seems to be a singular lack of curiosity to learn more.
But over the ensuing decades we can now state with confidence their general identity. They are mainly Malay-Tamils who were consolidated here after they were forced to build the Thai-Burma Railway in 1942-43.
But let’s approach this question from a different direction. Who might they be? Which groups of people were present in the Kanchanaburi area prior to the 1950s in sufficient numbers to leave behind 10,000 sets of remains? Could they be Thais? Not likely. During WW II, the walled city of Kanchanaburi was a rural trading post set at the confluence of two rivers. It had a population of no more than a few thousand people across the entire area. They were farmers and wood cutters who sold their harvests along the river. 10,000 ‘missing’ people is simply impossible. Another pertinent fact is that Thais cremate rather than bury their dead. So, not local Thais!
Could they be war dead; soldiers or POWs buried and forgotten? Here again, the number is too extreme. Following the completion of the Railway, some 50,000 Allied POWs were also consolidated to this area. Of the 61,000 POWs who worked the Railway, approximately 12,000 died in the jungle camps during the construction. Some of those who survived that ordeal did indeed die while incarcerated in this general area. But the military officers kept extremely accurate records of who died when and where. It is impossible that 10,000 were unaccounted for.
There was, however, a group of sufficient size in this area at this time to be able to generate 10,000 dead who would possibly have been buried in a relatively concentrated area near the temple. These were the romusha; the Asians forced to work the Railway alongside the POWs.
Precise information on who these people were is lacking. But we know enough to say that the majority were Tamils from Malaya. The exact reasons why people from Tamil Nadu in southern India and Ceylon were in Malaya is a whole different discussion. But suffice it to say that the conditions they found themselves in in 1941-42 were ripe for them to be conscripted by the Japanese to work the Railway.
In the interest of full disclosure, the largest ethnic group to work the Railway as romusha was the Burmese. There were an estimated 180,000 sent to work the Railway. But they worked exclusively in Burma and when the construction was complete, they simply melted back into the jungle and headed home. No Burmese were brought to Kanchanaburi.
We also know that there were a few thousand – probably no more than 5-6000 — ethnic Chinese. These were men from Singapore and Malaya who the Japanese considered British spies or at least British sympathizers who were deported to work the Railway as punishment.
It is also well documented that there were Javanese civilians imported to work the Railway in Thailand. They likely numbered no more than 7,500 – although some estimates are as high as 10,000.
Finally, there were a few hundred Vietnamese (aka Aminese) who were not imported but actually lived in this area and were swept up as convenient labor. Like their Burmese counterparts, they would simply have returned home.
By mid-1944, all of the surviving Allied POWs and most of the romusha were brought out of the jungle camps and placed in a number of camps in the Kanchanaburi area. It is believed that the largest of these camps held the surviving romusha. This would have included tens of thousands of Malay-Tamils. The camp that housed them is believed to have run parallel to the tracks with the west end near Wat ThaWorn Wararam and the Allied War Cemetery as they exist today. There is no contemporary photographic documentation of the location or size of that camp.
Just west of that camp area, opposite the entry gate of the Allied war cemetery, there is aerial recon photographic documentation of a hospital that the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) operated initially to treat the POW survivors of the Railway. Since the 10,000 sets of remains were located between that hospital and the romusha camp, it can only be assumed that that facility was used to treat the romusha after the POWs departed.
If we put all of these pieces together like a puzzle, we can develop a clearer picture of what transpired. That picture is supported by eyewitness accounts passed down among that Thai population. They recount a recurring series of events that were on from 1944, through 1945 and continued after the war into 1946 and even 1947.
Those witnesses say that every morning the hospital staff would dig a pit. Throughout the day they would deposit those who died. At the end of the day that grave was covered and a new one dug the next day. Day after day, week after week 1944 into ’45 and then ‘46 and ’47. One, three, five or more bodies a day. It is not hard to believe that they could have accumulated 10,000 bodies in that small area over such a period of time. It wasn’t until 1947 that the last of these romusha survivors were able to be repatriated to their home country.
Therefore, the only possible conclusion is that those remains beneath Chedi Niranam are primarily Malay Tamils.
More evidence
Completely unrelated to events at Wat ThaWorn Wararam, a sugar cane farmer unearthed some human bones while harvesting his crop in 1990. Just by coincidence, in another part of Kanchanaburi, some ancient remains had been discovered of some of the earliest inhabitants of this region. Thinking that these bones might also be very old, a group of archeologists was called in. They did a proper scientific archeological dig, documenting everything they found. They found that these were graves containing multiple bodies. In all, they unearthed over 500 skeletons. But there were also many other ‘finds’. There were common household items like metal spoons and shards of broken bottles. Some of these were able to be dated to the WW II era. Most significantly to the story at hand, one of the bodies was wearing a bracelet that was identified as being of Tamil origin! Also significant is that this field was very close to another hospital operated by the IJA and a small POW cemetery had been excavated nearby in the immediate post-war period. The only possible conclusion is that these 500 sets of remains were also romusha.
The majority of these remains were removed by a Chinese organization. They were taken to Saraburi where they were cremated and placed in a mass grave. But a very strange thing occurred. Some of those bones were handed over to a Chinese-Thai owner of a local museum. He had a glass case built. On the top level he assembled enough bones to display as two full skeletons. The lower compartment contained a jumble of disarticulated bones. He labelled the case to indicate that it contained a total of 106 sets of remains. And so, he maintained such a display in his for-profit museum for the next 30 years.
A minor miracle
After his death, his daughter took over the management of the museum. But in 2025, due to decreasing profits, she decided to close the museum. She was aware that the organization known as the Malaysians and Indians in Bangkok (MIB) was developing a place of remembrance for the romusha at the Chedi Niranam. She contacted the MIB to request that they properly dispose of those remains from that glass case. She felt that they needed —deserved – proper burial.
As the glass case was opened and the bones packaged for removal, the MIB requested that the skulls be separated as a means to determine if there were indeed 106 skeletons as asserted for all those years. As they were being prepared for cremation at the central temple in Kanchanaburi, the boxes were opened. Most of the boxes contained broken sections of human long bones: arm and leg bones. There were also many small bones (hand, foot and vertebrae) as well as scapulae and hip bones. But there was only a partial box of skulls! Some of them were broken so it was impossible to determine if those were pieces of one skull or many. In any case, there did not appear to be more than 15 total skulls. The claim of 106 skeletons was debunked. There appeared to be a large number of random human bones that would never reassemble into full skeletons!
In the process of assembling the cremains, the temple attendants wrapped the skulls and the two sets of skeletal remains that had been displayed as whole skeletons separately in linen parcels. The remainder of the cremains were committed to the waters of the Mae Klong River accompanied by Buddhist and Hindu prayers.
With the prearranged agreement of the abbot Wat ThaWorn Wararam, the bundled skulls and bones were taken to the Chedi Niranam. Accompanied by Buddhist chants, those parcels were inserted into the vent in the steeple of the chedi.
In this symbolic way, the bones of the two sets of workers were reunited at the chedi after 80 years!
Part 3 the Lt. Flaws maps
In the immediate post-war months, an Australian Lieutenant named Flaws traveled along the existing Railway to the various camps in Thailand. Using existing landmarks and data supplemented by survivor accounts, he drew a series of maps in an attempt to document the known POW grave areas. In the modern era, some have known landmarks that verify his work. For some of the more remote camps, no such landmarks persist. The former group attest to the accuracy of his work.
Two of these maps are of particular interest. In one, he depicts a third bridge at ThaMarKam which he labels as a road bridge downstream from the two railway bridges. This seemed to make no sense. There were no other contemporary references to any such bridge. The closest reference was to a ferry point in the approximate place where he depicts a bridge. In point of fact, decades later, a bridge was installed at that very location and the road on the opposite bank laid down over what is shown photographically to be a rail spur. In the early 2000s, a Thai language text was found that refers to a WW2-era bridge at a place called Chuk-a-Don. This is considerably farther downstream than Flaws drawing depicts, but it lends credence to his suggestion that such bridges did indeed exist even if they were not well documented.
I mention that 3 bridge map only to point to another of his maps that points to the location of what he labels as the Coolie Camp. He places the east end of the camp just to the west of the known F&H hospital and the current CWGC cemetery. The primary purpose of that map was to mark four areas where POWs were noted to have been buried in the area now occupied by the CWGC cemetery.
He does not provide any indication that there were known burials in the area where in 1950s what we now believe to be romusha graves were unearthed. But his task was to document POW graves not those of romusha. Consistently, none of his upcountry maps denote any romusha burials, even in areas where they may very well have been near the POW grave sites.
The oral tradition that is passed down today, states that the romusha camp was east of the F&H Hospital and parallel to the Railway. This would place the 1950s mass burials between the hospital and the camp. If Flaws accurately depicts the location of the camp, it would simply be a few hundred meters away from the known burial site. Either or both locations would seemingly not alter the conclusion that the graves found in the 1950s belonged to the romusha.
I am providing this addendum to the saga of Chedi Niranam in an effort to offset any argument concerning the precise placement of the romusha camp. Flaws’ map is the singular contemporary reference that persists until the present. We have no reason to doubt it; nor can we verify it with any other accounts.
Unfortunately, now 80 years on from the actual events, there are any number of references or statements that are thought to be true but are only provided by one narrator. Whether the ‘Coolie Camp’ was east or west of the well documented F&H Hospital hardly matters.