Phra Bat Somdet Phra Nangklao Chaoyuhua or Rama 3 was the King of Siam from 1824-1851. He plays a role in dating the existence of Wat Thaworn Wararam (aka Wat Yuan).
It is said that he was traveling up the MaeKlong River – perhaps headed to the Thai military outpost at LatYa – when the chanting of monks caught his attention. His entourage stopped to find a small temple with monks practicing the Mahayana form of Buddhism which differs from the Theravada[1] school that is generally practiced in Thailand.
From this story we know of the existence of this temple and a community of Vietnamese (also sometimes referred to as Animese) in this area for over 200 years. The exact story of how and why they came to be here is lost to history. The most commonly told version is that they were captives in one of the many wars that the Siamese fought across the centuries. Perhaps an entire village was brought to this area for some purpose before the early 1800s and settled there rather than attempt to return.
The locals call this temple Wat Yuan since yuan is the Thai slang word for Vietnamese. The monks there wear saffron shirts and trousers as opposed to the saffron robes of Theravada monks. The predominant language displayed throughout the temple is Chinese as opposed to Thai or Vietnamese.
The existence of a small community of Vietnamese also explains the presence of ethnic Vietnamese workers on the Thai-Burma Railway. They would not have been imported from French-Indo China but rather were there when the Japanese arrived at Kanchanaburi.
This temple’s involvement in the romusha story dates to the 1950s. As the main roadway of area named SangChuto Road was being improved and widened, the workers began unearthing graves. These bones seemed to be linked to the World War II Thai-Burma Railway but the connection was uncertain.
Since the land containing these graves had once belonged to the Temple, the abbot Phra Somnanam Wuttacharnpaisankanakit (Luang Pho Pho) agreed to take responsibility for the skeletons and so they were collected for storage at the temple. There is no evidence that any effort was made to identify these remains. No archeological or anthropological work was done.
The oral history as related by the current temple staff says that over the next few years, three separate burial ceremonies were performed and the now cremated remains were placed into a common grave in the temple cemetery. In 1957, after a time when no new remains were unearthed, the temple community erected a stupa or chedi over that grave site. They called Chedi Niranam or grave of the anonymous. Annually, the temple elders perform a Qing Ming[2] ceremony. This is a Chinese style ceremony honoring deceased ancestors. This continues into the present even though those performing the ceremony profess not to know precisely who is buried there.
The trail that has led us to determine that the remains in this grave are those of Thai-Burma Railway survivors who were consolidated to Kanchanaburi after the Railway was completed is related elsewhere in this website. The discovery of more WW2-era remains in mass graves in 1990 short distance from the temple reinforces the identity of the remains buried at Wat Thaworn Wararam, if only by inference. A proper archeological excavation was performed in 1990 and the remains of one young girl were shown to have been wearing a bracelet that was of Tamil origin. [See Section 9.1 for that story]
In 2024, the abbot granted permission to a group of Tamils to erect a Nadukal (aka Hero Stone) on this chedi and to re-dedicate it to the memory of the Thai-Burma Railway Asian Forced Laborers the vast majority of whom were Tamils from Malaya who were Hindus. [See Section 26]
[1] From WIKIPEDIA: Two major extant branches of Buddhism are generally recognized by scholars: Theravāda (lit. ’School of the Elders’) and Mahāyāna (lit. ’Great Vehicle’). The Theravada tradition emphasizes the attainment of nirvāṇa (lit. ’extinguishing’) as a means of transcending the individual self and ending the cycle of death and rebirth (saṃsāra), while the Mahayana tradition emphasizes the Bodhisattva ideal, in which one works for the liberation of all sentient beings. The Theravāda branch has a widespread following in Sri Lanka as well as in Southeast Asia, namely Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. The Mahāyāna branch—which includes the traditions of Zen and Shingon—is predominantly practiced in Nepal, Bhutan, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingming_Festival