74
Office, Kew, London, to ascertain details from their records. This I leave to more qualified people. I thank the staff of the Reading Room at the Imperial War Museum for their help and assistance in locating and providing material in their archives from which I obtained some details for this article and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Maidenhead, for information supplied by them. To David Mahoney thanks are due for the various tit-bits sent to me. I also thank Mr. D. Fletcher, of the Tank Museum, Bovington, Dorset, and the Imperial War Museum, London, and also others listed for their permission to reproduce photographs from their archives. All other photographs were taken by myself. I would especially like to thank Keith Stevens for being my mentor and for all his assistance in deciphering the Chinese characters on the gravestones, translating the notebooks held at the Imperial War Museum in London, together with his invaluable comments and suggestions for this article. Without his encouragement and pressure this article would not have been written! Finally, I thank my wife, Claudine, for her patience, companionship and for acting as interpreter on our many visits and also for translating various articles written in her native French.
Any errors or omissions are my responsibility.
"What, indeed, were the Chinese doing in France during the First World War?
Noyelles and Tungkang
As far as we were concerned the story began when we were touring the British military cemeteries in northern France where Chinese Labour Corps members had been buried during or immediately after the First World War. In one small village, Noyelles-sur-Mer, we were surprised to see a pair of Chinese white stone lions mounted on small plinths within the small village square - albeit it was close to what is known as the Chinese Cemetery in which the largest number of Chinese had been buried - and so we sought an explanation.
The immediate response was, as far as we could make out, that in 1994 the pair of Lions had arrived unannounced, borne by four Chinese who proclaimed that they were bringing them from the town of Tungkang in recognition of their twinning with the village of Noyelles on the Somme. Again, as far as we could understand, once the lions