I never knew there were Chinese on the Western Front, nor that they played a crucial role in the Allied war effort. In 1916, Britain and France, their workforces depleted by the huge numbers of young men serving in the armed forces, started a recruitment drive in China. Around 100,000 men travelled halfway across the world to work in Britain's Chinese Labour Corps, with another 40,000 recruited by the French. Along with workers from Egypt, India and South Africa, they dug trenches, worked in factories, repaired roads and railways. After the war, they cleared mines and helped dispose of the dead.

The hard lives of the foreign workers, and their sad deaths – around 2000 Chinese are buried in a cemetery near the coast of France – are overlooked in most accounts of the First World War. Spending a day on the fields of Flanders brings their hidden story to light, as well as offering a different perspective on some stories we thought we knew.

We are not the only ones touring the old battlefields. The anniversary of the First World War has brought a tourist boom to Belgium. Interestingly, this is not Belgium's first experience with war tourism.  In the 19th century, in the aftermath of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo near Brussels, jingoistic Britons enjoyed touring the battlefield where the French dictator had been vanquished.

However, the World War I commemorations are bigger than anything that has gone before; appropriately, given the scale of the conflict. The numbers are staggering. Ten million soldiers died in the war, along with seven million civilians. Britain lost 700,000 soldiers, as well as another 200,000 from across the Empire. The Russians lost 1.8 million men. The Germans lost two million men.

Australia sent 300,000 troops to war, of whom 46,000 died. An additional 133,000 were wounded, captured or missing in action. Australia's total population of the time was fewer than five million.

Our tour starts with visits to some of the German and British cemeteries in the area. (The French preferred to repatriate the bodies of their soldiers.) The differences between the two nations' cemeteries are instantly visible.

The Germans favoured traditional forest cemeteries, with graves sheltered by ranks of tall trees. Vladslo cemetery is perhaps the most-visited German cemetery, due to the memorial donated by German sculptor Käthe Kollwitz which stands at the back of the cemetery. Titled The Mourning Parents, it is a very personal work: Kollwitz's son Peter is buried at the cemetery.

What moves me most about Vladslo, however, is the simplicity of the place. Rather than tombstones, unadorned plaques lie in the earth, each listing the name and rank of 20 soldiers. There are a lot of these plaques: the cemetery contains the remains of 25,000 soldiers. Presumably impoverished post-war Germany lacked the money to erect anything more elaborate.

The British cemeteries are very different: neat lawns punctuated with white crosses. The largest, Tyne Cot, marks the resting place of almost 12,000 soldiers, most of whom have individual tombstones. The long, gleaming white rows create a dizzying effect.

Most of the headstones are marked with a name and date of death; where the corpse could not be identified, the legend reads simply, A Soldier of the Great War. A memorial wall at one end of the cemetery carried the names of another 35,000 soldiers missing in action.

Tyne Cot is a former battle site. The highest point of the gently sloping cemetery was the German artillery position which the Allied troops, led by the Third Australian Division, successfully stormed. Here, as in the rest of this flat country, the slightest rise gave a huge advantage to whichever army held it. Year upon year, wave after wave of young men was sent out with the near-impossible task of capturing these secure spots. I can't help thinking that the high command of both sides deserved to be impeached for war crimes against their own troops.

Some of the war's fiercest battles were fought in this area. The Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 commemorates the most famous of the three separate battles of Passchendaele. Over 100 days in 1917, half a million Allied soldiers, including Australians, died to capture just eight kilometres of ground.

The museum tells the story using uniforms, battlefield archaeology and artillery; its exhibits include the Dugout Experience, with replicas of the communication tunnels, dressing posts, and sleeping quarters, all located underground because at this stage of the war, nothing above ground was left standing.

It is followed by the Trench Experience, a reconstructed network of German and allied trenches. What's lacking, of course, is the mud which was such an ineradicable part of the trench experience. This low-lying part of Flanders was largely reclaimed through dykes; when that infrastructure was destroyed early in the war, the opposing armies spent years  mired in the mud.

Also worth visiting is the new In Flanders Field Museum at Iepes, the Belgian city better known by its French name, Ypres. In the Middle Ages, Iepes was one of the wealthiest towns in Europe, as its ornate buildings, mighty cathedral and imposing cloth hall – housing the museum – seem to attest.

Today's Iepes, however, is a mirage. Like Germany and Poland 30 years later, Flanders suffered huge destruction in the First World War. An area of around 1000 square km was levelled, including five villages and the city of Iepes.

That most of the rebuilding program was completed by 1930 is an astonishing accomplishment. At one point, it seemed that Iepes might not be rebuilt - Winston Churchill, for one, wanted the ruined city to stand as a lasting memorial to the conflict. The locals, understandably, were determined to get their city back.

The museum offers a number of perspectives on the conflict, from the soldiers to the women they left behind. There are fascinating insights into the medical aspects of the conflict: hotels were turned into hospitals, workshops for manufacturing surgical equipment and artificial limbs were established, new surgical techniques were pioneered.

An interesting statistic catches my eye:  seven million people, 10 per cent of the entire armed forces, became prisoners of war. For them, the armistice brought little relief. For two years after the armistice, the Allies used German POWs as forced labour for tasks such as clearing rubble.

The most moving memorial in Ieper, however, is the daily playing of the Last Post cemetery at the Menin Gate memorial. This barrel-vaulted arch stands on the site of Iepes' old eastern gate, through which British and Commonwealth troops passed on their way to the front.

The memorial was designed in 1921 to commemorate Commonwealth soldiers missing in action. On completion, it was discovered that the arch was too small to fit the names of all the missing. The names of almost 55,000 Commonwealth soldiers are inscribed on the gate; the remainder, almost 35,000, was later inscribed at Tyne Cot.

The 8pm playing of the Last Post has become a popular attraction; however, when many of the attendees thrust their mobile phones in the air to record it, the moment loses some of its solemnity. A local tells me the best time to experience it is on a cold winter night, when only a few hardy souls brave the weather to commemorate the fallen.

TRIP NOTES

MORE INFORMATION

visitflanders.com.

GETTING THERE

Emirates operates 84 flights per week from Australia to Dubai with  a daily connection to Brussels, where there are regular train services to Antwerp. Phone 1 300 303 777; See emirates.com/au.

STAYING THERE

Ambrosia Hotel, D'Hont Straat 54, is a family-owned hotel with a central location. Rooms start at $126. See ambrosiahotel.be

TOURING THERE

Many  companies offer private or small group tours of the battlefields. Reliable operators include Rent a Guide (rentaguide.be) and Quasimodo (quasimodo.be).

DINING THERE

De Fonderie, Polenlaan 3, see defonderie.be; Au Miroir, Grote Markt 12, see aumiroir.be; Old Tom, Grote Markt 8, see oldtom.be.

The writer was the guest of Visit Flanders and Emirates Airlines.