Nolette Chinese Cemetery

With over 825 white funerary columns, with Chinese characters, this is the largest Chinese cemetery in France. You will find it near the hamlet of Nolette on the road to Sailly-Flibeaucourt. As a result of an agreement made on 12/30/1916, thousands of Chinese - most of them farmers from northern China - enlisted in the English army. The first arrived in April 1917; between 1917 and 1919 there were some 12,000 in the camp. they worked in very difficult conditions building ammunition depots, railways and hospitals, clearing the battlefields and burying the dead; they were kept far from the local population and could not move freely. many of them died in the war or died in the Spanish flu epidemic in the fall of 1918. Some remained in France, but most returned to their country in late 1919.

"Arranged in 1921 by the lmperial War Graves Commission at a locality of Argilière, on the plans of Edwyn Lutyens, the Chinese cemetery of Nolette shelters the graves of 814 Chinese workers in the service of the British army during the Great War Its architecture mixes with the usual norms of British military cemeteries specifically Chinese forms (entrance gate, stele motifs). "