China (First World War)

Chinese Labour Corps

The Chinese Labour Corps was recruited from 1916 to assist with Britain’s desire for an ever-growing requirement for manpower to carry out labouring tasks on the Western Front. By the end of the conflict nearly 100,000 Chinamen had enlisted and served in France and Flanders, and continued to serve well into 1920 helping to clear up the old battlefields and recover the dead.

Shanghai Contingent

In Shanghai, the War Office accepted an offer of 110 men who had previous military training, for service at the front. The British community paid for the passages of the men. (Details)

External links

• "The 36th Sikhs at the fall of Tsingtao: China- October to November 1914" from Harry’s Sideshows kaiserscross.com (retrieved 21 June 2014)
• "Anglo-Japanese Naval Cooperation, 1914-1918" by Timothy D. Saxon Naval War College Review Winter 2000, Vol. 53 Issue 1, p62 . Website of Liberty University, Lynchburg, Virginia, USA
• "The forgotten army of the first world war" [Chinese Labour Corps] South China Morning Post. scmp.com
• "Forgotten voices from the Great War: the Chinese Labour Corps" by Alew Calvo and Bao Qiaoni. The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 49, No 1, December 21, 2015. academia.edu

Historical books online

• "How We Brought the Chinese War-Workers to France" by Davis C Rodgers pages 421-426 The Wide World Magazine. Adventure - Travel - Sport. Volume 40 1917-1918 November-April? Archive.org. The voyage from China to Vancouver for three thousand men of the Chinese Labour Corps No 1.
• With the Chinks by Daryl Klein, 2nd Lieutenant in the Chinese Labour Corps, 1919 Archive.org
• Record of Services Given and Honours Attained by Members of the Chinese Customs Service, War 1914-1918 Published 1922, Shanghai. Archive.org
• The Fall of Tsingtau. With a study of Japan’s ambitions in China by Jefferson Jones. 1915 Archive.org. It is stated elsewhere that Jones was the Staff Correspondent of the Minneapolis Journal and Japan Advertiser and that this book was banned in the UK during WW1 as being hostile to Japan, an ally of Britain.

Extract with photographs. greatwardifferent.com, now an archived website.

• "With the Germans in Tsingtau. An Eye-Witness Account of the Capture of Germany’s Colony in China" by Alfred M Brace, [War Correspondent], page 634 The World's Work. A History of Our Time. Vol. 29, Nov 1914 to April 1915 Archive.org
• My Escape from Donington Hall : preceded by an Account of the Siege of Kiao-Chow in 1915 by Kapitanleutnant Gunther Plüschow of the German Air Service. Translated by Pauline de Chary. 1922 Archive.org. Qingdao, then called Kiao-Chow (Tsingtao), or its German colonial name Tsingtau.

Fiction

• Within the Four Seas : a Shantung Idyll by Paul Richard Abbott published Shanghai : The Commercial Press, 1930. A series of chapter downloads from STOU Digital Repository, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, Thailand. A description elsewhere says "A fictional tale of a young Chinese scholar who has run away from the tyranny of his family to work with the Chinese Labor Corps in France during the Great War". The author is stated to be an American missionary and the book is discussed from page 84 in Cultural Engagement In Missionary China: American Missionary Novels 1880-1930 by Yi-Ling Lin PhD Thesis in Comparative Literature, Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013.