Text of Vivian's personal account at the annual Memorial Service at the Royal British Legion National Remembrance Gardens.

Good afternoon. My name is Vivian Ni, and I come from Zhoushan, a place closely connected to the memories of many people here. It's an archipelago of more than one thousand islands on the East China Sea.

When I was young, I once travelled to Dongji Islands, on the very eastern edge of the archipelago. It took me about three hours by boat. I stayed overnight in a fisherman's house. I still remember lying awake that night. The village was completely silent, and all I could hear was the sea breaking against the rocks outside. How could that little girl have known what had happened in those same waters half a century earlier?

In October 1942, the Lisbon Maru, carrying British prisoners of war, was torpedoed by an American submarine whose crew did not know the prisoners were aboard. As the ship sank, fishermen from the Dongji islands went out in their small boats, again and again, and rescued 384 men from the sea. I knew almost none of this when I made that childhood journey.

For me, the story truly began in 2015. On the evening of 10 November, a message reached me from Zhoushan. Mr. Hu Mu was looking for a Zhoushan born journalist in Britain who could visit the family of Charles Jordan, one of the men rescued at Dongji. The visit was the following morning. I knew very little about the Lisbon Maru. But I knew one thing: I should go. So I took the train to a Hampshire town I had never heard of before, called Liphook.

Outside the station, I couldn't find a taxi and did something slightly foolish. I asked a complete stranger if she might give me a lift. To my surprise, she said yes. During that short journey she asked why I was there, and I told her the story I had only learnt properly the night before. She was amazed. By the time she dropped me off, one more person in the town of Liphook knew about Lisbon Maru.

At the Jordan family home, I met Mrs. Doreen Jordan, Charles's widow, their three children, and Major Brian Finch. Brian had just returned from Hong Kong carrying something entrusted to him by Hu Mu and others in Zhoushan: a stone from Dongji. I watched Doreen place that stone in the centre of a shelf surrounded by photographs of her family. And on the same shelf stood a colourful fisherman's painting she and Charles had brought home from Zhoushan years earlier. Its title was Grandpa's Grandpa.

Unfortunately I never had the chance to meet Charles. By the time I came to his home, I was already too late. But before my visit I had found his recorded testimony in the archive of the Imperial War Museum. Afterwards, while writing his story, I listened to his voice again and again. A few months later, I learned that Doreen passed away too. And perhaps that is when I began to understand something about memory. It disappears if nobody passes it on.

Fortunately, so many people chose not to let this story disappear. Brian told me that his connection with Lisbon Maru survivors goes back to the 1960s, and he has spent decades helping to keep their memories alive. Mr Hu Mu first travelled to the waters where the Lisbon Maru sank in 2005, and has helped keep the annual memorial service alive ever since. I told the story to one more stranger that morning, and later published it in a newspaper read by tens of thousands of people. Families kept photographs, letters and stories. Archives kept voices. And the famous Chinese director Fang Li spent nearly seven years gathering those fragments together for his remarkable documentary. Today, through his work, millions more people have encountered the story of the Lisbon Maru.

There is a Chinese saying: a single spark can kindle a great fire. Memory can be like that. Before millions remembered, a few people remembered.

Today, as we stand here in Staffordshire, people in Zhoushan are also gathering in remembrance. And I find myself thinking again about that painting in Mrs. Doreen Jordan's living room: Grandpa's Grandpa. When I first saw those words eleven years ago, I thought they were charming. Today, I think I understand them better. This is how a story survives. One generation tells the next about people they may never have met.

So today, as a daughter of Zhoushan, I would simply like to bring you a message from home: We remember your fathers and grandfathers, and also those who never came home. And we are deeply moved that, here in Britain, you still remember ours. May we continue to tell the story of our grandfathers' grandfathers, together. Thank you.