In Transit: Gare de Lyon

Some images from today at the Gare de Lyon, the second busiest railway station in France.

How busy?

I’m posting these from a sluggish connection aboard a train back home and a quick search tosses all kinds of figures out there, many based on a 2018 figure in Wikipedia that I suspect is outdated. I’ll cite Paristouristinformation.fr, which says 83 million annually. That’s about 228 thousand daily.

The sculpture above, “To the Chinese Workers during the First World War” by Chinese sculptor Li Xiaocha, was unveiled outside of the station on 20 September 2018 to commemorate as per an auto-translation on SNCF.fr:

This artwork commemorates the commitment of the 140,000 Chinese laborers who came to help France during the First World War, between August 1916 and February 1918. These men were to spend many months at sea to reach Marseille, before taking the train to Paris-Gare de Lyon. Intended to work in factories in China, they ultimately helped the French and British armies dig trenches, repair weapons, and recover the bodies of fallen soldiers.

20,000 men perished in the line of duty or succumbed to disease. After the armistice of November 11, 1918, most of these men were repatriated, but 3,000 chose to remain in France. Some settled on the Îlot Chalon, near the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris, and formed the first Chinese community in Paris.

A pair of short slide shows below.

These locations look familiar.

Photos from 8 November 2024.