Punjabi soldiers and policemen served in China for most of a century.
Sikh regiments were part of the Anglo-French force in the Second Opium War in 1860 and were present at the burning of the Summer Palace at Peking, which is a fact that appears in Chinese accounts of the period and in almost no Punjabi one.
In 1900 Indian units including Punjabis formed a large part of the Eight-Nation Alliance force in the Boxer Rebellion.
Sikh policemen staffed the Shanghai Municipal Police and the Hong Kong Police from the 1880s, and the turbaned Sikh constable is a fixture of period photography and of Chinese popular memory of the concession era, where he is not remembered fondly.
Gurdwaras were built at Shanghai, Hong Kong and elsewhere.
Punjabi soldiers were the instrument of empire as well as its subjects, in China, in Africa, in Burma and in Mesopotamia, and the accounts written in Punjab do not generally say so.
Punjabi troops were in the force sent to Peking in 1900, and Sikh regiments garrisoned the treaty ports. Sikh policemen were employed in Shanghai and Hong Kong for decades.
The Shanghai Sikh police were a recognised and resented institution in that city and their gurdwara stood there. The Hong Kong force's gurdwara is still in use.
That posting is where a number of Ghadar contacts were made, and men who had served in the eastern ports appear in the movement's records afterward.