World War One's forgotten heroes: why we must remember the Chinese Labour Corps

At this time of year, as people up and down the country pin crimson poppies to their lapels and prepare to recognise the extraordinary sacrifices made by our armed forces, the message is emphatic: we will remember them.

Despite that collective resolution, however, there remain some contributions to Britain’s war efforts over the last century that have never received the attention they deserve. Many untold acts of heroism exist, but arguably none is greater in scale – or less heralded – than that of the Chinese Labour Corps in the First World War. This year, 100 years on from their deployment, it’s hoped that might finally change.

Karen Soo

Speaking at the the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the group at the China Institute in central London last month, Joanna Lumley, who has lent her support to a campaign to recognise the Chinese contribution to the war effort, excused our ignorance.

“These are men scrubbed out of history, so it is not a surprise that people do not know the story,” she says. “The implications of China’s role were vast, and we must study it.”

By 1916, the British Army had swollen considerably in the First World War. Forces once of a few hundred thousand men had increased to around a million, and the labour supply tasked with keeping that army going – repairing vehicles, building roads, transporting ammunition – grew thin. Catastrophic losses in the bloody Battle of the Somme later that year saw all those labourers called to the front line. Finding themselves equally desperate for non-combat manpower, the British and French landed on an unlikely source. 

The government of China, which was at that point resolutely neutral during the war, offered to send men to help the Allies. The offer came repeatedly, in fact – midway through its ‘century of humiliation’ and languishing in near-poverty, China saw the war as an opportunity to make its mark on the world stage – yet it wasn’t until late 1916 that a deal was struck to ship tens of thousands of workers over to France.

The Chinese Labour Corps (CLC), as it became known, consisted of mainly poor and uneducated men from all over China, though the majority came from the north-eastern province of Shandong, where people were considered larger and better suited to European winters.

Their journey was perilous: a gruelling three-month passage across the Pacific, secretly crossing Canada by train (blacked-out carriages avoided taxes and kept the media from reporting their movements) and back onto ships over the Atlantic, where they eventually joined up with their commanding British and French officers and got to work.

One of these boats, a French vessel, was sunk by a German torpedo in August 1917, forcing China to break its neutrality and declare war on Germany. Undeterred by the incident, though, boat after boat continued to make the journey, until the CLC reportedly consisted of around 140,000 men – far greater than the labour corps from any other nation.

In their contracts, hastily drawn-up prior to departure, the Allies agreed the recruits would be employed for three years, kept a number of miles from the frontline and receive a small wage. All three of those terms were pushed, at best.

“At that time, war would have meant nothing to these men. They might have heard there was one on – there was a threat from the Japanese – but they wouldn’t have understood what they were going into,” says Karen Soo, who explores the role her grandfather, Soo Yuan Yi, played in the group in a Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Forgotten Army, to be shown on Remembrance Sunday. Soo Yuan Yi joined up on his own at the age of 20, in the hope of sending money back to his parents. “When they signed the contracts, it was supposed to be ‘factory and agricultural work’. The reality was much different.”

As well as helping to repair vehicles and unload ships, the CLC’s tasks, conducted 10 hours a day, seven days a week, aside from three holiday days, included digging trenches, burying the dead, filling in bomb craters (that frontline promise was heavily revised) and staying long after Armistice Day in order to turn the battle-scarred land back into farmable fields. It was exhausting and deadly; in all, the Chinese lost an estimated 3,000 men in France.

“Imagine it,” Soo, 42, says, “you arrive on a battlefield not knowing what’s going on, and an officer tells you, ‘see that bomb over there?’ Whenever that happens, you rush over and fill the hole up. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Lumley, whose support for the group follows her successful campaign to improve the rights of the Gurkhas in 2008, believes a large part the CLC’s unheralded status lies in the nature of the work they were doing.

“They were given the absolute dogsbody tasks. You don’t really consider all the clearing up that has to happen after war. You think of the people wounded, people coming home and recovering, but how often do you think of what was left? Who clears up after these great slaughters?” she said. 

Joanna Lumley

The plaque in London, which was backed by prominent members of the British-Chinese community, from the late businessman Sir David Tang to the actress Gemma Chan, is the first memorial to namecheck the CLC’s role in the war. Plans for a more prominent monument elsewhere in London are afoot. At the moment, of the roughly 60,000 war memorials around the UK, none mention China at all.

Referred to as the ‘forgotten of the forgotten’, much of the CLC dispersed after the war, either returning to China or settling in countries like Britain or America. Some, though, remained under contract until as late as 1922, working in construction or manufacturing until they were free to leave.

The CLC’s slow erasure from the history books began just as the war ended. After the Allies broke a promise to return Shandong Province (by then under Japanese control) in return for their support, China refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles as a mark of what it saw as betrayal. Medals given by the British to veterans of the war were of a lower quality for the CLC than everybody else, too. And perhaps most crushingly, when space was needed on the ‘Panthéon de la Guerre’ – a vast, 13m-high painting begun in France in 1914 and showing its international war allies – to include the late arrival of the USA in 1917, the Chinese were quite literally painted over.

“It’s a shameful episode,” Lumley says, “and it shows a lot about how we look at war. Curriculums are never going to bother with people who weren’t soldiers. They were just utterly forgotten. Part of humanity is having the courtesy to remember things like this and to just look around. We must not forget the people who weren’t the headline heroes. We must remember the backroom boys, too.”

After completing his service, Soo’s grandfather arrived by boat in Liverpool and made a home there. Like many in his generation, he rarely spoke of his war experience, and in the absence of public recognition, his story – as well as those of his fellow CLC members – remained hidden until only recently.

“We focus on the fighters and fliers, but the First World War was a team effort, and everybody in that team should be commemorated,” says Soo. “Who knows what might have happened without them.”

Britain’s Forgotten Army is on Channel 4 on Sunday 12th November at 7pm