‘By the terms of this contract…I, the undersigned coolie recruited by the Weihaiwei Labour Bureau, declare myself to be a willing labourer’ Wording of contract signed by finger print by all Chinese labourers. The Royal Asiatic Society says that Scotland Yard still has the fingerprints in their files. Scotland Yard and they say they haven't got these. (it doesn't mean they haven't got them, but that's the party line, anyway)
On the 30th December 1916 an agreement was signed between the British and the Chinese Governments for the employment of Chinese men for a labour force on the Western Front.(this is not exactly true, though the Chinese had to approve the conditions offered, because of the 1904 Agreement for labourers going to South Africa. There were several weeks of negotiations before the Chinese were satisfied, inasmuch as they could be, because the British always had the upper hand. The British carried on recruiting even in the absence of a Chinese accord.)
From 1917 onwards, large numbers of Chinese (altogether 100,000) were recruited by the British in Shantung Province, China, as volunteers under military discipline. Recruitment in Shantung Province, in the town of Weihaiwei, was facilitated by the enrolment of British missionaries, traders and their families as interpreters. There are 94,000 names on the medal roll. The recruitment was not only in Shandong, but also in Hebei (then called Chihli). Very few labourers were recruited from Weihaiwei itself. Men from elsewhere went there, through, because China proper was neutral, so anyone who wanted to enrol had to do so in British territory, where they were "deemed British". Weihaiwei itself had a very small population, and there weren't many men there of the right age, and needing the kind of income the labourers would earn. The families in Weihaiwei made small fortuines in supplying the Corps.
The close personal contact these expatriates had with the local Chinese community also proved to be extremely useful in getting the required number of recruits to come forward. The first batch of volunteers left by sea for Europe in January 1917 - amid fierce protestations by the Germans from their embassy in Peking - and arrived in April 1917. The first ship arrived in Plymouth, and the labourers went from England by train/ferry to France. The initial British Chinese Labour Force encampment on the Western Front was at Noyelles-sur-Mer, on the Somme estuary. It was located on the D40 road about 12km from Abbeville. By the end of 1917 there were 54,000 Chinese in the British Labour Force on the Western Front.
Conditions of work for the Chinese Labour Corps on the Western Front was rather onerous with contracts stipulating a seven-day working week of 10-hour days. Daily rates of pay for the coolies ranged from 1 to 3 French Francs, with 5 French Francs for supervisors and interpreters.
Though even farm labourers in England worked similar hours before 1919. And the Chinese labourers, in addition to their wage (equivalent to about 1/3rd of a British private's wage, and much more than they could earn in China), had family allowances, and free food, board, clothing and "lighting and fuel, and medical attendance". Their life wasn't easy, but then whose was in northern France at the time?. It was in nobody's interest to have an ineffective workforce, especially one brought half way across the world for the war effort.
To deter fraud, fingerprints of the entire British Chinese Labour Force were registered by Scotland Yard.
In all, thirty-two camps were established on the Western Front for the British Chinese Labour Corps. The Corps was headed by Lieutenant-Colonel Faixfax who had been brought back from retirement in 1916 for this specific task. Within these camps efforts were made by the administration to maintain and support Chinese cultural practices. Seven camps, which were located in the Pas de Calais and Somme Departments, were in continuous use for the remaining duration of the war. The British Chinese Labour Force also participated in the clear-up and recovery operations after the Armistice and sustained many further casualties from unexploded munitions and the like. Almost 80,000 of them were still at work on the former Western Front in May 1919.
From a contemporary report On my first war-time crossing of the Channel, among the ships of the convoy were two steamers from whose upper decks multitudes of strange folk looked across at us. They were all dressed alike in long, loose-fitting cloaks of ruddy brown material, and they wore little caps with cat-flaps not unlike those donned by our airmen when aloft. Their hair was jet black, their strange, expressionless' faces berry brown. They were Manchurians nearing the land of war to give their labour to the cause of Britain—for a sound, commercial consideration be it premised.
At that time one had heard vaguely about "Chinese labour," but here was its embodiment in these two shiploads of grinning Orientals, who looked so curiously alike that one seemed to see the same man a hundred times over. ... I was to see more of these far-travelled Children of the Dawn in my next day's journey, as I had arranged to visit the main camp, where they are received and whence they are drafted to the sectors where their labour or their craftsmanship is most required.
Few things that I have seen in the British zone impressed me more favourably with the British genius for organisation than the handling and bestowal of these Chinese labourers...Figure what it means to sign a contract for three years' work at a place over six thousand miles away from your home !...
By extraordinary good luck, when I arrived at the labour camp the two boat-loads I had seen the day before were just detraining, and were going through the preliminaries of their reception. In long files they slowly moved up to the finger-printing huts, each man carrying two large paper forms on which his name was written in Chinese characters and in English. Various, personal details were already entered, such as his native town, date of engagement, state of health at embarkation, and the like. But most interesting were the twelve spaces for his finger-prints.
In the sheds were rows of finger-printers, Chinese trained to the work, each of whom stood at a bench beside a lithographic stone which he frequently inked from a printer's roller, and as each new arrival came up the printer swiftly took hold of his right hand, pressed the tip of the little finger on the inked stone, then upon the space reserved for it on the paper, and so with each finger of both hands in turn, finally bunching the five fingers together and printing the group as one. This was repeated on the duplicate sheet, the whole process involving no fewer than forty- eight inkings and impressions, and yet was it accomplished with such celerity that I have taken longer to describe it than these dexterous Chinamen took to effect it.
One of the papers would be filed for reference—a work involving a large staff of Army clerks and an extensive equipment of vertical filing apparatus—the other kept by the labourer as his identity certificate. ...