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Nationally, we know of around 300 soldiers in World War I who fought for Australia, who were of Chinese descent, whose parents or grandparents had come from China. And for the Loddon Mallee Region, it's around 40 people that we've identified. So there's always room to add to that number, that there were stories that we're still discovering. Australia was their home, so something that was thought of in Australia's best interests was something that they wanted to be part of as Australians.
So there was a colour line, as we call it, in the Australian armed forces. And perhaps that doesn't get emphasised, I think, a lot in standard histories and remembrances of World War I and the Anzac story, that you had to be actually of substantially European origins. That meant that your parents, your grandparents all should mostly be European, according to that law. To us, that seems something very strange, very unfair. But unfortunately, it was something that Chinese people or people of Chinese background who thought of themselves as Australians had to deal with in certain aspects of their lives.
So George Lee Kim, he is one of our most decorated Chinese Anzacs from our region, also a decorated soldier, plain and simple. He was born on the Market Garden in Grassy Flat, which is an area of Northeast Bendigo, in 1897. And his father, William Lee Kim, was a migrant from southern China.
He was someone that men naturally followed. He was someone that was thought of almost as being lucky on the battlefield, that if you followed George Lee Kim, you'd be right. Certainly, it was in a situation like that when he was awarded the military medal, that the commanding officer through-- was taken out of action in the course of the battle. And George Lee Kim led the men to safety under his temporary command in that situation.
And so for that, he was awarded the military medal. The Chinese Anzac story, it's not the beginning of the story of the Chinese-Australians in the armed forces, that I think that if you go back to the Boer War, even some of the 19th-century conflicts, you will find the beginnings of that history of Chinese and non-European Australians in our armed forces and serving our country. So it's not the beginning of that story, and it's certainly not the end either. And there were-- certainly, you can continue that story through World War II, through Vietnam, and through to the present day, that that is part of a larger narrative of our military history.