The following men of the Chinese Labour Corps are all buried at St Omer Cemetery, having died on the 18th/19thMay. WEI KUANG YU 28120 KAO TIEN HSIANG 61491 WANG AN CH’ING 31745 CHAO HO SHUN 28022 CHANG TO WEN 27288 CHOU YU CHIEH 27583 KAI CHI AN 28095 LI TENG YUAN 50525 HSI HSING FEN …
Author Archives: Campaign Team
Video: Robbed of Reason
To mark Mental Health Awareness Week we are launching our latest video, Robbed of Reason. When 96,000 Chinese volunteered to work for the British army on the First World War’s Western Front they almost certainly had no idea what they had let themselves in for. The Chinese Labour Corps were all but forgotten after the war, despite two …
A prophetic view of a future war with Japan
It was a Chinese official at Peking who first gave me the sense that China is unconquerable and conquering. I had gone to this official to ask certain questions concerning political affairs, he had listened quietly and answered with seeming frankness. He had no illusions concerning the present situation. The Chinese Government was weak; its …
President Woodrow Wilson describes “profound sympathy for China”.
You have heard a great deal- something that was true and a great deal that was false-about that provision of the treaty which hands over to Japan the rights which Germany enjoyed in the Province of Shantung in China. In the first place, Germany did not enjoy any rights there that other nations had not …

Commenting on the Betrayal in Paris
So much for self-determination! I think it is really shameless! Mao Zedong The taste of colonialism in its full bitterness had never come home to the Chinese until then, even though we had already had the experience of several decades of foreign exploitation behind us. The sharp pain of imperialistic oppression then reached the …

Centenary of the United States joining the war.
On 6th April, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany [sentence edited in response to comment below]. This turn of events will lead to China’s eventual declaration of war. How so? China had attempted to formally join the allies on several occasions. At the outbreak of the Great War the Chinese government offered military …

Exhibition: A Good Reputation Endures Forever: The Chinese Labour Corps on the Western Front
7th April 2017, 10:00 to 24th September 2017, 17:00, Oriental Museum, Elvet Hill, Durham, DH1 3TH We have been privileged to have been working with Durham University’s Oriental Museum on this historic exhibition exploring the role of the thousands of Chinese who risked their lives alongside the British armed forces during the First World War. …
Report on members of the Chinese Labourer Corps hospitalised in Liverpool.
“The fact that none of them could speak English rendered the work somewhat difficult, an interpreter in the person of a Chinese corporal having to remain in the hospital during the whole of the time that any of the Chinese patients remained. As an example of the wonderful behaviour of these men and the manner …
Out of China by Professor Robert Bickers
Robert Bickers, who many will know from his excellent contribution to the Penguin (China) World War One Special Editions with Getting Stuck in For Shanghai: Putting the Kibosh on the Kaiser from the Bund: The British at Shanghai and the Great War, has written a new book, Out of China, officially published on 30 March: …