France: a "Garden of Peace" for Chinese workers in the First World War
Nolette Chinese Cemetery, the burial site of 849 Chinese workers who died in World War I, in Noyelles-sur-Mer, northern France (photo taken August 1, 2013).
AFP - PHILIPPE HUGUEN
Text by: RFI Follow
1 min
On this day of commemoration of the armistice that ended the First World War, a tribute will be paid to foreigners who came to support the war effort, in particular with a garden for Chinese workers buried in Noyelles-sur-Mer, in The north of france.
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“
It was November 11, 1918. A day I will never forget.
That day, from 11 am, the fighting everywhere stopped,
”said Gu Xingqing, Chinese interpreter and writer, who was part of the
Chinese Labor Corps
.
Like him, some 140,000 Chinese workers left the eastern province of Shandong from 1916 to be hired by the French and British in munitions factories or to clean the trenches.
Eight hundred and forty-nine of them are buried in the cemetery of Noyelles-sur-Mer, where work on a "Garden of peace" will begin these days.
"
These people are forgotten, a little lost in an agricultural field very far from their native country
”
,
underlines Tiantian, at the microphone of our correspondent in Beijing,
Stéphane Lagarde
. This landscape designer from Tianjin (eastern China) graduated from the Versailles school and is part of the team that won the call for tenders for the construction of this garden. “
The fields of today were fields of battle yesterday. It is also the contrast of this story.
"
Contrast between yesterday and today, a memory that the landscapers intend to recall through a discreet garden, very calm in the middle of fields as far as the eye can see in the Somme countryside.
A small bench on a small embankment looks towards the east and this distant Orient from which started, more than a century ago, these men who left everything behind them.
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First World War
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