An exemplar on how to turn the history of the Chinese Labour Corps and Chinese workers into a documentary film and creative writing.
Programme
- 3.30pm - Registration and book signing
- 4pm - Welcome and introduction
- Dr Lucy Bond, Head of School of Humanities, Westminster University
- Dean Chungwen Li, Ming-Ai Institute
- 4.15pm - "Grandpas' Untold Stories"
- Documentary film by Caroline Chu
- 5pm - "For Whom the Temple Waits"
- Authors: Clive Harvey & Caroline Chu
- Artist: Shiquan Zou
- Historical Photos: John de Lucy
- 5.30pm - Panel Discussion - chair by Prof Cangbai Wang (Dr Anne Witchard, Dr Michael Nath, Dr Frances Wood, and Prof Anna Branach-Kallas)
- 6.15pm - Q&A
- 6.30pm - Refreshment and networking
- 7pm- end
The event is jointly organised by the HOMELandS Research Centre of the University of Westminster and the British Chinese Heritage Centre. It is free to attend and open to the public, but registration is required.
About the authors
Clive Harvey
Music composer, renowned flamenco guitarist, poet and author, Clive Harvey has a long-standing fascination with the dispersion of peoples from their homelands. The origin of flamenco was the first diaspora to grip Clive as a child. No wonder the supressed story about the exodus of some 140,000 young Chinese men across the globe to serve in WW1 was to touch him so profoundly. Following Yang’s War, Clive’s first historic novel, For Whom the Temple Waits is a fitting progression crafted to attract TV and film interest in this ground-breaking account of human resilience and survival.
Caroline Chu
Caroline Chu is a filmmaker and screenwriter. She holds a BA in Chinese from Paris's National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations and refined her screenwriting craft under Adam Tobin at Stanford University (2015-2016). With a master’s in film production (Paris) and a second in Editing (London), her decade-long research on Chinese WWI workers, involving interviews in France and the UK, has produced acclaimed documentaries. After a 2-and-a-half-year collaboration, she co-wrote the novel For Whom the Temple Waits. She expertly develops narratives across fiction and documentary and is currently completing the documentary In the Frame.
About the panellists
Anna Branach-Kallas
Anna Branach-Kallas is full professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. She is an interdisciplinary researcher, whose main areas of interest include trauma and war, postcolonial literatures in English and French, ethics, political philosophy and memory studies. She is the author of over ninety articles and book chapters, and has published five books, including, most recently, Decolonizing the Memory of the First World War: The Poetics and Politics of Centenary Interventions (Routledge, 2024). She currently serves as Head of the Doctoral School of Humanities, Theology and Art at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and President of the International Council of Canadian Studies.
Michael Nath
Michael Nath teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. He has published academic work on modernism and creative-writing practice. As a novelist, he is the author of La Rochelle (Route, 2010, shortlisted for James Tait Black Prize for Fiction), British Story: A Romance (Route, 2014), The Treatment (Quercus, 2020) and Talbot & The Fall: A Comedy (With Support) (forthcoming, Indirect Books, 2026). He is presently working on a novel on laughter: Hamilton’s Big Favour: Or, A Woman Possessed. His work has appeared in: Stand; New Welsh Review; Critical Quarterly; Route anthologies; L’Esprit Literary Review; West Trade Review. For reviews, etc, see Michael's Blog.
Anne Witchard
Anne Witchard is Reader in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She has published widely on representations of China and the Chinese in Britain, including Chiang Yee and his Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950 (HKUP, 2022) co-edited with Paul Bevan and Da Zheng; British Modernism and Chinoiserie (EUP 2015); England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and The Great War (Penguin 2014); Lao She in London (HKUP 2012) and Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009). She organised ‘China and World War One’, Imperial War Museum, May 4th, 2016, and recently published an article about the CLC for the British Library.
Frances Wood
Frances Wood is a distinguished sinologist and former head of the British Library's Chinese collection. A leading expert, her pivotal work Betrayed Ally (2016) examines the history of Chinese workers in WWI. With a PhD from SOAS, her career spans decades of scholarly writing and lecturing on Chinese history. In 2023, she was honoured with China's prestigious Special Book Award from the National Press and Publications Administration, a national award recognising her profound lifelong contributions to the study and global understanding of Chinese culture and history.
