This week I had some awkwardly-timed hospital appointments. As our recent attempts to minimize Grab rides had also left us with a list of need-to-buy items that were difficult to acquire with the aid of feet alone, we decided to hire a car for three days, and use it to blat lots of tasks.

We couldn't do anything exciting, of course, given the circumstances and the rules in operation. But it made a really welcome change to be able to go just a little further than is normally possible.

Today, between a walk in the park and a session in the supermarket, we stopped off at the Memorial to the Nanyang Volunteer Drivers and Mechanics in Tabuan Laru (whose existence I found out about via Kajomag).

The monument commemorates the approximately 3,200 young people from Southeast Asia who in 1939 headed for Yunnan as volunteer drivers and mechanics, to aid the Chinese forces against Japan. Their numbers included about 100 from Sarawak, and 100 who weren't of Chinese descent.


It was unveiled in 2016 by the three Sarawakian volunteers who were then still surviving (they have all since died).


The images on the monument seemed curiously familiar, and sure enough, we'd seen something like this in Haikou, Hainan, back in 2018. (There's a picture of the English-language plaque for that one here, and of course many of the volunteers would originally have hailed from Hainan, one of the key sources of migration to Southeast Asia.)

This source is in Chinese, so I'm relying on Google's translation (E&OE, therefore), but it's interestingly comprehensive:

"In October 1938, the Japanese occupied Guangzhou; by then, all the important ports along China's southeast coast had fallen under Japanese control, and China's most important military arms supply lines had been completely disrupted... Before the fall of Guangzhou, two million troops and more than 540,000 tons of military supplies had been transported by the Guangdong-Han Railway. After the Japanese occupation of Guangzhou, this route was completely cut off, making international land transport channels the only way out.

"The National Government initially had three land transport corridors... The biggest problem facing the southwest transportation route was the lack of vehicles and the lack of people who could drive... By the end of 1938, more than 6,000 tons of cargo had been stranded...

"In order to solve the problem of lack of drivers and mechanics, the Southwest Transportation Department found Chen Jiageng [aka Tan Kah Kee, a Nanyang millionaire "rubber king" originally from Fujian]...

"In February 1939, Nanyang newspapers published the Notice of the Nanyang Overseas Chinese Association's recruitment of overseas Chinese mechanics. Judging from the contents of the Notice, the recruitment conditions were very strict. First, mechanics were required to be skilled drivers, and to hold a driver's license issued by the local government. Second, the recruitment requirements stipulated people between 20 and 40 years old, who were familiar with Chinese, and had no bad habits. Third, any candidate must have an introduction from a local person or business, [so that recruiters would] know that the candidate was a patriotic volunteer [this was necessary because the Japanese were also wooing overseas Chinese]...

"On February 18, 1939, at 3 p.m., the first group of 80 members of the Nanyang Overseas Chinese Machine Engineering Service set off by boat from Singapore and returned to their motherland...

"After returning home [home always meaning China in this discourse], and after two months of training, the Nanyang Overseas Chinese mechanics were finally on their way. In front of them was an extremely difficult road -- the Burma Highway.

"The Burma-Myanmar Highway starts in Kunming, Yunnan, goes west through the city, and leads directly to the Lajuan Highway in Myanmar, with a total length of 1,146 kilometers...

"The Nanyang Chinese mechanics were divided into 17 brigades, driving more than 3,000 large trucks, day and night on a road that even horses did not want to tread. The convoy loaded up with goods from Myanmar ... [and] the whole journey [to Kunming] generally took more than six days. Drivers would drive during the day and sleep in the cab at night...

"On the road to Burma, the Nanyang Chinese mechanics faced not only the danger of car accidents, but also another invisible killer, malaria... From October 1940, in less than six months, the Japanese flew more than 400 sorties and bombarded the Burma-Myanmar highway indiscriminately. The Nanyang Chinese mechanics were at the forefront of the war...

"Under such harsh conditions, of the more than 3,000 Nanyang Chinese workers who returned to join the anti-Japanese war, more than 1,000 were killed in this incredibly difficult bloodbath on the Burma Road."



Among the volunteer mechanics and drivers were four women (the rather tragic profile of one of them, Li Yue Mei from Penang, can be found here).

So, it's an interesting story, and I'm glad we have a monument here, to match those in Penang, Kunming, and other places.

It's a tranquil area, and the nearby temple will be worth a return visit when such things become possible again.