World War I is on our screens again with the release of the German movie All Quiet on the Western Front – and at the same time, TopFoto has been working on a small but extraordinary and little-known WW1 collection, available to license for the first time and exclusive to TopFoto.
pd3006826: Chinese Labour Corps – 1918 All images credit: The De Lucy Archive / TopFoto
The contribution of the Chinese Labour Corps, recruited in North China and sent to the Western Front to free up soldiers for the trenches, was caught in moving detail by British office Lieutenant W J Hawkings, OBE, a businessman who lived and worked in China before and after the Great War. He spoke Mandarin, and photographed the men and their daily lives, from their journey from Wei-Hai-Wei to their destination just behind the lines on the Western Front, near the Somme. The freshness of the images is down to Hawkings’ connection and empathy with the men, and importantly, he was photographing not for propaganda but as an authentic record of a life he was sharing.
PD3006836: Signpost for the Depot of the Chinese Labour Corps in Noyelles, France, Western Front WWI
Following the journey through all the small series of photographs, the inner picture we may have of the battlefields shifts and we can sense the true nuances. Some of the images show the men readying themselves for their kite flying competition, and holding their traditional musical instruments. When the bombs weren’t falling, the daily scenes of the conflict will have had kites flying, with music from all kinds of instruments and cultures mingling round endless rows of tents, and the click-clack of dice and gambling (officially banned, but tolerated).
The Chinese volunteers came through British Weihaiwei, as it was then, on the northeastern coast of China, a leased territory of the United Kingdom from 1898 until 1930. It was used as a recruiting ground for the Allies to draw on the Chinese population without the Chinese Government having to act illegally (China was officially neutral at this stage but in this way could align with Britain and France).
PD3006850: 103 Skilled Trades Company, Noyelles. Admired for their muscular and athletic prowess.
The Allies goal in calling for Chinese volunteers was to free up men in 1917 for the slaughter of the trenches, assigning the Chinese peasants the support tasks, in many cases dangerously close to the front line, including hospital work, cooking, vegetable gardening, machine repair work, care of the animals. After the war had ended, the Chinese Labour Corps remained in post to clear the battlefields, bury the dead, and deal with unexploded shells and small munitions. They undertook dangerous work from 1917 to c 1920, with many injuries and an estimated 3,000 deaths.
Many of the 96,000 or so recruits were peasants from the provinces of Northern China, mostly from Shandong province. Their ease with animals and land is clear in the photographs, from the relaxed and confident pose on horseback, to the training of a small bird and a gardener’s pride in his plot. Some recruits stayed in France permanently, visible today as Chinatowns.
The 74 or so images of the Chinese Labour Corps now represented by TopFoto are a key part of the De Lucy Archive, a private collection and family archive held by the descendants of Lieutenant Hawkings. Discovered by Hawkings’ grandson in 2014, the photographs were exhibited and seen as part of the WW1 centenary commemorations but this is the first time that the images have been made available for licensing and easy to access for publication. More imagery from the De Lucy Archive on other topics will be made available via TopFoto in the coming months.
PD3006869: Chinese Labour Corps – 1917 The sanitary squad a board ship. Many cargo ships had very limited toilet facilities!
