How Chinese labourers helped shape Europe
For centuries, the roots of Cheng Ling’s family burrowed deep into the wheat and potato fields of Shandong province. Yet one family member ventured far away, farmer Bi Cuide. The family has one memento of that journey, in fact the sole possession Cheng has to remind her of grandfather Bi. It is a bronze medal bearing the profile of a sombre King George V on one side, and St George on horseback, clutching a sword, the steed trampling the shield of the Central Powers. The sun of victory rises above. The sun of victory rises between two years: 1914, 1918.
The British medal of merit marks Bi’s sacrifice in helping the British military to win the first world war. The honour arrived after peace had been made, along with some money for his widow. All the family knew is that Bi had died, somewhere abroad. Cheng first discovered the disc when she visited her ancestral home in Laiwu in the 1970s. Then a teenager, she was curious about the number etched along the rim: 97237.
For decades, no-one in her family knew what that meant.
The first world war pitted the allied powers, including Britain, France and Russia, against the Central Powers, including Germany and the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires. Years into fighting, the male populations were depleted. Soldiers were hunkered in trenches carved into the countryside of Europe. The allies needed help, and it came from China.
Chinese workers dug trenches. They repaired tanks in Normandy. They assembled shells for artillery. They transported munitions in Dannes. They unloaded supplies and war material in the port of Dunkirk. They ventured farther afield, too. Graves in Basra, in southern Iraq, contain remains of hundreds of Chinese workers who died carrying water for British troops in an offensive against the Ottoman Empire.
Bi joined hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, mostly from the countryside, to help Britain, France and the other members of the Entente win the war that toppled the empires of Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans and Germany.
The story of the largest and longest-serving non-European labour contingent in the war has largely been forgotten but is slowly being rediscovered a century later.
It is the story of farmers, intellectuals and young students joining French, British, American and Russian forces for money and even for education in Europe.
