Across Empires and into the Trenches
During the First World War (1914-1918), the British engaged in a covert operation to recruit more than 80,000 men from the Shandong Peninsula in northern China to serve as the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC).
The British shipped the men on CPR Empress steamships from China to British Columbia, where they were quarantined in an overcrowded “coolie camp” at the William Head Institution, a quarantine station near Victoria. Military personnel kept guard over the men as they were transferred to Halifax in CPR railcars along the same tracks built in part by Chinese people a generation earlier. From Halifax, they boarded ships headed to the front lines of the war in France and Belgium.
Although the British recruited the CLC as “non-combatant” workers, they assigned the men hazardous cleanup duties such as removing battlefield corpses and handling unexploded bombs. Riots and strikes broke out regularly, leading to the execution of ten Chinese workers. An estimated 2,000 CLC members died in Europe. Some of those who returned to China claimed the British never paid them for their work. These events remained buried until the Canadian military’s CLC file was declassified in 1985.