British Chinese Armed Forces Heritage Double Lecture on Chinese Labour Corps

Please register on eventbrite for this lecture https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-contribution-of-the-chinese-labour-corps-in-the-first-world-war-tickets-46229269991

John De Lucy (6pm) and Frances Wood (7.15pm) will each speak on the Chinese Labour Corps:

1. SPEAKER:

John de Lucy (Grandson of WW1 CLC Officer W.J. Hawkings)

TALK ABSTRACT:

During the First World War Britian hired over 100,000 men from China to fill the labour shortage. In this talk, John de Lucy explains how his Grandfather, W.J. Hawkings, brought these workers to France to help with the war effort. After the war, the workers were retained to help clear the battlefields before being repatriated back to China. This is a chance to take a look at the rare collection of photographs taken by W.J Hawkings depicting the lives of the Chinese Labour Corps, both in China and on the Western Front.

2. SPEAKER:

Frances Wood studied at Liverpool College of Art 1966-7 and at Newnham College, Cambridge, 1967-1971 (BA Hons. Chinese) She spent 1975-6 at Peking University and wrote her PhD on traditional domestic architecture in Peking (London, 1984). She worked in the Chinese section of SOAS Library from 1972 until 1977 when she joined the British Library and worked in the Chinese section until 2013. Her publications include Stones of the Wall 1986 (translation of a novel by Dai Houying), Chinese Illustration (1986), A Companion to China (1989), The Blue Guide to China (1990, 2002), Did Marco Polo Go To China? (1995), No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port life in China 1843-1943, (1998), Hand Grenade Practice in China: my part in the Cultural Revolution (2000), The Silk Road (2002), The Forbidden City (2005), The First Emperor (2007), The Lure of China: writers on China from Marco polo to J.G.Ballard (2009), The Diamond Sutra: the story of the world’s earliest dated printed book (2010), Picnics Prohibited: diplomacy in a chaotic China during the First World War (2014), Betrayed Ally: China in the Great War (2016, with Christopher Arnander), Great Books of China (2017) and with Andrew Lo, Wang Tz’u-cheng and Song Jiayu, Export Paintings in the British Library (2011).

TALK – ESSENTIAL BUT UNACKNOWLEDGED: THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE CHINESE LABOUR CORPS IN WW1

Known as ‘The Forgotten of the Forgotten’, Dr Frances Wood sheds light on the untold story of the 100,000 Chinese who were recruited into the Chinese Labour Corps of World War One.