Chinese Laborers in World War I: From the Battlefield to the Wheat Fields

He was shipped to France like a “piglet” and survived two years beneath the shells. The foreigners called him Number 1327. Only the Chinese laborers who died remembered his name.

The day he returned alive, he knelt on the ground before his home and scooped up a handful of earth. Ten mu of land had been his father’s dream. The three-room house was what he had traded his life for. His son, Panpan, was his one and only hope. He carved the names of those he had known on the battlefield into a monument at the village entrance and recorded them in a book, to be passed down through the generations.

From the trenches of France to the wheat fields of Shandong, from a “piglet” to a Chinese man who could hold his head high, his story is a reflection of 140,000 Chinese laborers, the footprints of a people rising to their feet, and the last words a father left his son: Live standing tall. Never kneel.

This book is dedicated to all those who rose from the earth.