About

When Britain realised that the war would last longer than expected and was taking its toll on their soldiers at the Western Front, they looked east to China to recruit a labour force of men to work behind the lines. Nearly 100,000 men were shipped over from the province of Shandong to northern France and Flanders. This was the Chinese Labour Corps and, together with a further 40,000 employed by the French, they would become the largest foreign labour corps to serve the Allies during World War I.

Peng Wenlan is a documentary filmmaker specialising in China with particular focus on modern history and social issues. She headed a three-year project on the Chinese Labour Corps on behalf of The Meridian Society, a London-based charitable organisation committed to the promotion of Chinese culture, and of which she is a founding member. The oral history film 'Forgotten Faces of the Great War' was one of the outcomes of the project.