July 28, 2014 marked the centenary of the First World War’s outbreak in Europe. A hundred years later, the story of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers, the largest non-European labour contingent in the war, is only slowly being rediscovered.

In a special report, The South China Morning Post traces their story from rural Shandong to the European war trenches and back through archive photos, eyewitness accounts, maps and news articles published in the Post at the time, when the Hong Kong paper was only a decade old.

SCMP Chronicles; an ongoing series of long-form multimedia stories brought to you by the South China Morning Post.