Canadians and the Chinese Labour Corps in the First World War

Local author Dan Black has just-published Harry Livingstone’s Forgotten Men: Canadians and the Chinese Labour Corps in the First World War (Toronto, ON: Lorimer Publishing, 2019).

Using government records and privately held diaries and memoirs, Black removes the veil of secrecy from an extraordinary wartime undertaking to move tens of thousands of men from China across Canada in 1917-1918 and back again at the conclusion of the war.

In 1917, the British government enrolled approximately 95,000 Chinese men to labour behind the Front in France and Belgium by building and repairing roads and railways, moving supplies and undertaking whatever labour was needed in support of the fighting troops. To expedite the transfer of what was known as the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) to the Western Front, some 84,000 members of the CLC were brought to Canada by ship and most of them were transported by the Canadian Pacific Railway across Canada from Vancouver to east coast ports en route to France and Belgium. This massive movement was done in the strictest secrecy and is one of the less known events of the Great War.

The trains raced across Canada, only stopping for fuel and water. With the pressure mounting to move and accommodate the men on their journey east, a temporary holding camp was established at Petawawa, northwest of Ottawa. Not all of the men stopped there, but many did.

On September 22, 1917, one of the labourers, twenty-five-year-old Chou Ming Shan (39038), died of malaria while on one of the trains as it crossed through Ontario. At Petawawa, his body was carried off the train and interred in an unknown location on the Base. He was just one of about fifty CLC men who died in Canada.

On Thursday, October 3, the Canadian Agency of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission unveiled a memorial to Chou Ming Shan in a small abandoned cemetery located on the firing range at Garrison Petawawa.

The commemoration ceremony was attended by about a dozen persons, including Dominique Boulais of  the CWGC, Brigadier Nick Orr (British High Commission), Col. Louis Lapointe, Commander 4th Canadian Division Support group at Garrison Petawawa and author Dan Black of Merrickville, Ontario, who helped bring Chou Ming Shan’s death and burial to the attention of the CWGC.

Thanks to Glenn Wright who attended the ceremony and penned this item.