Nanaimo Vancouver Island British Columbia - Nanaimo's Vancouver Island Military Museum is preparing to place another little-known piece of Canadian war history on display.
 
More than 2,000 men from China died while working as labourers on the battlefields of Europe in the First World War, but few people today are aware of the Chinese Labour Corps, or that in 1917, an estimated 80,000 Chinese men were transported by train from Victoria to Halifax in secret by the government to to bypass a $500 head tax on Chinese labourers.
 
Brian McFadden, VIMM vice-president, said he learned about the labour corps while researching the history of a Canadian construction battalion in the First World War.
 
"I saw a photograph of a railway carriage and there was Chinese labourers working with what you could tell was a British soldier, and there was a huge artillery shell. And at the back of the carriage there was a black soldier, and I thought, World War I, 1916. The Americans weren't in the war in 1916. Where did the black soldier come from? So that's sort of what started me looking at support for the troops, was there anybody else like the Black Battalion? Boom, Chinese Labour Corps."
 
McFadden said he didn't think much more about it until he came across a crest bearing the letters CLC, which turned out to be the Chinese Labour Corps' official crest.
 
That led him to a photo of a British officer examining a CLC member.
 
The British soldier in the photo was identified as Harry Livingstone.
 
"He's the great nephew of David Livingstone, the African explorer. Canada sent him over there and said don't talk about this. You're on a secret mission, that's it, but you're going to check these guys because they're going to travel across Canada by rail, and we don't want to be talking about this because of the head tax," McFadden said.
 
France was the first country to recruit Chinese labourers to deal with a shortage of skilled and unskilled labourers and the idea was quickly picked up by the British to supply workers for railway construction and maintenance work on the western front.
 
According to an article written by McFadden for the VIMM newsletter, China, militarily neutral at the time, saw an opportunity to position itself as an international power.
 
China's labour department sanctioned the plan and Britain and France recruited nearly 140,000 Chinese labourers throughout the war.
 
Each of the Chinese volunteers were paid an embarkation fee of 20 yuan and 10 yuan paid monthly to their families in China.
 
Labourers recruited by the British were transported by ship from China to Victoria and then loaded onto railway cars that were sealed, preventing them from leaving the trains during the six-day journey to Halifax.
 
There, they boarded ships bound for Europe.
 
About 80,000 of them crossed Canada this way, and many died on the journey from disease, accidents, and disputes that broke out in the cramped conditions, and were buried in unmarked graves in BC and Ontario.
 
Those who made it to Europe were divided into groups of 500 men, based on their skills, and assigned to tasks, under British officers, that involved hard and dangerous work, often close to the fighting on the front lines.
 
More than 2,000 died from shelling, bullets, or landmines even though they were non-combatants.
 
"I found a small piece of a newspaper with Winston Churchill's name in there. He approved these guys getting the British war medal," McFadden said.
 
Those who died were classified as war casualties and buried in war cemeteries in Europe.
 
Those who survived were transported back to China, but have received little historical recognition for their service.
 
In one instance, they were originally depicted in a 122-metre-long painting exhibited in Paris showing allied forces, but their images were painted over and replaced by images of American soldiers and the stars and stripes.
 
"They and their British officers were the last ones to be repatriated," McFadden said.
 
"It was 1920, so they kept these guys on the battlefields cleaning up. It's a fascinating story."
 
The military museum plans to have the display completed later this spring.
 
Chris Bush.