Kinmen County: The 56 Hours in 1949 That Determined Kinmen’s Fate for 75 Years

30-second overview: Kinmen is about 1.8 kilometers from Jiaoyu off Xiamen at its closest point, and 358 kilometers from Taipei. The Cold War placed a county somewhere geography alone would never have put it. In 1387, Zhou Dexing built the Kinmen garrison fortress here, taking the eight characters “solid as metal and moat, a mighty guard at the sea gate” as the place name. At 2 a.m. on October 25, 1949, three Communist regiments, 9,086 men, landed on the beaches of Guningtou, and Taiwan’s armed forces fought for 56 hours before repelling them. If those 56 hours had not held, there would be no term “cross-Strait” today. For 44 days beginning at 5:30 p.m. on August 23, 1958, 474,910 artillery shells fell on an island of 151 square kilometers; three deputy commanders died at the Taiwu Mountain command post that same afternoon. The subsequent rule of shelling on odd-numbered days and no shelling on even-numbered days continued for another 21 years, ending only on January 1, 1979, when the United States and the PRC established diplomatic relations. From 1956 to 1992, Kinmen was under 36 years of warzone administration: curfew was at 10 p.m. (9 p.m. in Matsu), entry and exit required applications, radios had to be registered, and flotation devices were banned from beaches. Today, 145,000 people are registered in Kinmen, and at four in the morning the speedboats from Shuitou Pier to Wutong in Xiamen outnumber flights to Taipei Songshan. Yeh Hua-cheng’s great-grandson waited 67 years for an apology.

Looking at Xiamen From Kinmen Means Looking Across a 1.8-Kilometer Strait

If you stand at the northernmost end of Dadan Island in Kinmen and look north, the high-rises of downtown Xiamen seem to float directly on the horizon.

Kinmen’s closest point to China is Jiaoyu in Tong’an District, Xiamen, at a straight-line distance of about 1.8 kilometers¹. Seen from that distance, Kinmen is 358 kilometers from Taipei, nearly 200 times farther than it is from Xiamen. If you take a Mini Three Links speedboat from Kinmen’s Shuitou Pier, you arrive at Xiamen’s Wutong Pier in 45 minutes; if you fly to Songshan, the flight time plus travel to and from the airport, check-in, and luggage easily consume half a day².

The geographic fact of Kinmen County is this: it is this close to China, yet it is not a Chinese county; it is this far from Taipei, yet it is a county governed from Taipei.

The county’s full administrative name is “Kinmen County, Fujian Province, Republic of China.” It does not belong to Taiwan Province. Like Lienchiang County (Matsu), it belongs to Fujian Province, a province that was virtualized in 1996, streamlined in 1998, and formally stripped of its functions in 2019. But on identity cards and in household-registration systems, Kinmen residents are still, to this day, people of “Kinmen County, Fujian Province”³.

Kinmen’s main island covers 134 square kilometers. Together with Lieyu (Little Kinmen), Dadan, Erdan, Wuqiu, and other islands, the county totals 151.6 square kilometers. It is divided into six townships and towns: Jincheng, the county seat; Jinhu; Jinsha; and Jinning on the main island; Lieyu Township on Little Kinmen; and Wuqiu Township, an administrative miracle to be discussed later⁴. Its geology is mainly granite. Taiwu Mountain is the main island’s central ridge, only 253 meters above sea level, but this low mountain absorbed the 44-day rain of artillery shells in 1958.

To understand Kinmen, one must first set aside the intuition that “geography determines belonging.” Kinmen is a county of Taiwan, but Kinmen has never belonged to Taiwan’s geography.

At Two in the Morning, the 56 Hours on Guningtou Beach

At 2 a.m. on October 25, 1949, Communist troops began coming ashore.

By that summer, the outcome of the Chinese Civil War had already become clear. The Nationalist forces were losing ground across China, and their main units were withdrawing to Taiwan. In May that year, Kinmen came under Nationalist control, commanded by Tang En-bo. In October, Communist forces had just won a major victory in the Battle of Xiamen, validating their ability to cross the sea and lifting morale. The 28th Army was ordered to cross and attack Kinmen.

That night, three Communist regiments, the 244th Regiment of the 82nd Division, the 251st Regiment of the 84th Division, and the 253rd Regiment of the 85th Division, all under the 28th Army, departed from Xiamen and landed along the northern coast of Guningtou Village and around Lincuo. The first wave numbered about 9,086 troops⁵. ⚠️ This figure comes from Nationalist military histories and mainstream sources on both sides of the Strait. Because sea conditions and Nationalist blockades prevented later waves from continuing ashore after the landing, some sources estimate that the total force committed may have been higher if troops stranded on the water are included.

The battle’s key moment came at dawn. After landing, Communist forces advanced toward Jincheng Township in three columns, and the night fighting became extremely dangerous for the Nationalist troops. M5A1 tanks changed the situation. At the time, the Nationalist forces in Kinmen had only three U.S.-supplied M5A1 light tanks, numbered 64, 65, and 66. Before the battle, tank No. 66 had broken down on the beach at Guningtou, but this made it one of the earliest fire-support points on the shore⁶. The Communist troops had crossed by infantry and had no anti-tank weapons. Those three tanks on the sandy beach became the protagonists of the popular memory that “tanks saved Kinmen.”

By October 26, the Nationalist forces had completed an encirclement, compressing the Communist troops onto Guningtou’s northern shore. In the early hours of October 27, the remaining Communist forces tried to withdraw across the water and were annihilated on the tidal flats. From 2 a.m. to the morning of the 27th, the battle lasted a full 56 hours⁷. Nationalist military histories record more than 15,000 enemy troops killed or captured⁸. ⚠️ If only the first landing wave of 9,086 men is counted, a killed-and-captured total exceeding the number landed creates a logical contradiction. Some explanations say the figure includes troops destroyed on the water, or cross-counting of casualties and prisoners. This article presents the Nationalist military-history framework while noting the unresolved arithmetic.

📝 Curator’s note: At the 2024 ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Guningtou, Kinmen County Magistrate Chen Fu-hai’s official-sounding line, “remember history, cherish peace, and defend sovereignty,” was easy to hear as routine bureaucratic language⁹. But the battle’s real historical position is not in the rhetoric. By the summer and autumn of 1949, Communist forces had already “liberated” most of China. If Kinmen had fallen, the stepping-stone from Xiamen into the Taiwan Strait would have opened, and defending Taiwan proper would have become far more difficult. Only after the Korean War broke out in 1950 and the U.S. Seventh Fleet helped defend the Taiwan Strait was the Taiwan Strait defense line fixed by the international situation. But Guningtou in 1949 had already pressed the structure of divided rule into geography. Those 56 hours were not merely the duration of one victory; they were the starting point for 75 years of divided rule across the Strait. If the Communist landing had succeeded, there would be no “Republic of China” as a still-operating government today, no proper noun “Cross-Strait relations,” and no .md file you are reading now.

At 5:30 p.m., Three Deputy Commanders Died on Taiwu Mountain

At 5:30 p.m. on August 23, 1958, artillery shells fell without warning.

It was one of the most tense summers of the Cold War. The United States and China were locked in a contest, and Mao Zedong decided to “shell Kinmen” to test the U.S. response and proclaim to the world the PRC’s sovereignty claim over Taiwan. The Communist forces never intended to land on Kinmen. Their aim was to use artillery to force the issue onto the international negotiating table.

In the first two hours of shelling, tens of thousands of rounds fell on Kinmen. The Nationalist Kinmen Defense Command was located at the Taiwu Mountain command post. Three deputy commanders, Chao Chia-hsiang, Chang Chieh, and Chi Hsing-wen, were killed one after another near the Taiwu Mountain command post that same afternoon¹⁰. Chi Hsing-wen had been the division commander whose troops fired the first shots at the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, initiating full-scale war between China and Japan. Twenty-one years later, he was killed in Kinmen by Chinese Communist artillery. Chiang Ching-kuo was also inspecting Kinmen that day and fortunately survived.

Over the next 44 days, according to Ministry of National Defense military histories, Communist forces fired a total of 474,910 shells¹¹. Kinmen’s total area is about 151.6 square kilometers, meaning the island absorbed an average of nearly 3,132 shells per square kilometer.

✦ “During the August 23 Artillery Battle, Communist forces fired a total of 474,910 shells at Kinmen.”¹¹

On September 7, a U.S. convoy escorted resupply ships to the waters off Kinmen and helped break through the Communist naval blockade. On September 11, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles publicly stated that aggression against the offshore islands would be treated as aggression against Taiwan proper. On October 5, Communist forces announced a unilateral ceasefire. But the war did not really end. On October 25, the ninth anniversary of the Battle of Guningtou, Mao Zedong issued the “Message to Compatriots in Taiwan,” announcing “shelling on odd-numbered days, ceasefire on even-numbered days.” This became known as “shelling on odd days, no shelling on even days”¹².

This rule lasted 21 years. From October 25, 1958, to January 1, 1979, when the United States and the PRC formally established diplomatic relations, the shelling continued until Washington required its cessation as a condition for diplomatic normalization. For 21 years, everyday life for Kinmen residents meant this: for 15 odd-numbered days every month, they had to hide from shells; only on even-numbered days could they live normally. In the later period, most shells were propaganda shells loaded with leaflets rather than lethal rounds. But for residents, you did not know whether the next shell carried leaflets or explosives, and you did not know when the clock might return to 5:30 p.m. on August 23.

During Those 36 Years, Kinmen’s Curfew Was 10 p.m.

Warzone administration began in July 1956 and ended on November 7, 1992, lasting a full 36 years¹³.

The term “warzone administration” deserves to be unpacked. It was a system of integrated military-civilian governance implemented by the Republic of China government in Kinmen and Matsu: county magistrates were concurrently military officers, local administration was controlled by the defense command, and parts of the civilian judicial process were replaced by military law. The Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion were abolished in 1991, but warzone administration in Kinmen and Matsu had its own legal basis and had to be abolished separately. Martial law was lifted on Taiwan proper in 1987; Kinmen and Matsu did not leave the martial-law system until November 7, 1992, more than five years later than Taiwan proper¹³.

What kinds of rules constrained residents’ daily lives during those 36 years?

Curfew was at 10 p.m.¹⁴. In Matsu it was 9 p.m.; the one-hour difference reflects how the two places’ military sensitivity was calculated differently. Entry and exit were controlled: Kinmen residents going to Taiwan proper needed an “entry-exit permit,” while people from Taiwan proper entering Kinmen needed a relative’s guarantee or military approval. No flotation devices of any kind were allowed at the seaside: swim rings, rubber rafts, basketballs, and tires were all on the prohibited list, for fear that residents might use them to swim to the other side. Radios had to be registered, and listening to certain frequencies was banned to prevent exposure to Communist propaganda broadcasts. At certain times, buildings could not exceed two floors. During some periods, military scrip rather than New Taiwan dollars circulated in Kinmen.

Local democratic mechanisms were frozen: county magistrates and township heads were appointed by the military, not elected. Kinmen did not have its first elected county magistrate until 1993, 43 years after Taiwan proper first held county and city magistrate elections in 1950.

✦ “In Kinmen, we were still under military control five years after martial law was lifted. Do you understand what that felt like? Martial law ended in Taiwan proper in July, but we had to wait until November 1992.”¹⁴

At the height of the military-control period, the number of Nationalist troops stationed in Kinmen is estimated to have reached 50,000 to 100,000, while the resident population was about 50,000 to 70,000. There were more soldiers than civilians¹⁵. On an island of 151 square kilometers lived a force approaching one-third the size of Taiwan’s modern army. Underground tunnel networks spread across the island: Taiwu Mountain, Zhaishan, Jiugong, Mashan, Qionglin. Beneath each place name were military works carved from concrete and granite. Zhaishan Tunnel, through which tourists now paddle kayaks, was excavated between 1961 and 1965. Its main function was as a supply base for submarines and small landing craft, and it could accommodate 42 small boats¹⁶. Jiugong Tunnel on Lieyu (Little Kinmen) is even larger, 780 meters long, with 30 to 50 meters of granite overhead, enough to withstand a direct hit by ordinary bombs.

The war did not end; it was hidden inside the granite.

Yeh Hua-cheng’s Great-Grandson Waited 67 Years for an Apology

Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor is the symbol of Kinmen most familiar to people in Taiwan. But the origin story of this bottle has two versions: the official version and the Yeh family version.

The official version is that Kinmen Distillery was founded by Defense Commander Hu Lien in the early 1950s. It used locally grown sorghum as raw material to produce liquor, increasing military funds and stabilizing public morale¹⁷. This version entered the county gazetteer, Kinmen Distillery’s official history, and every tourist guide.

The Yeh family version is different. Yeh Hua-cheng was a local Kinmen distiller. Around the time Nationalist forces withdrew to Taiwan in 1949, he founded “Jincheng Distillery” in Kinmen City, later renamed “Jiulongjiang Distillery,” and developed the technology for making kaoliang liquor. In 1952, Hu Lien, acting in the name of the military, forcibly requisitioned the distillery and renamed it “Kinmen Distillery,” later Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor Inc. Although Yeh Hua-cheng stayed on as a technical adviser, he lost ownership and recognition as founder¹⁸.

✦ “The kaoliang liquor formula and brewing technique were created by my great-grandfather Yeh Hua-cheng. In 1952, they were forcibly requisitioned, and to this day Kinmen Distillery has never formally acknowledged this history. We are not asking for compensation. We are asking only that history be treated justly.” — Yeh Hua-cheng’s great-grandson, Yeh Wei-jen¹⁸

Around 2019, Yeh Hua-cheng’s great-grandson Yeh Wei-jen began speaking publicly about this history. What he wanted was formal recognition: the three characters “Yeh Hua-cheng” written into the distillery’s official history, not monetary compensation. From 1952 to the year he spoke out publicly was exactly 67 years.

Kinmen Distillery today is a public enterprise owned by the Kinmen County Government, with annual revenue exceeding NT$10 billion. It is one of the county government’s main sources of finance. Every bottle of Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor sold creates more fiscal room for Kinmen’s health-insurance subsidies, elderly allowances, and student subsidies. The Yeh family’s forcibly requisitioned private distillery became the cornerstone of Kinmen County’s public finances.

📝 Curator’s note: The standard Kinmen narrative presents kaoliang liquor as a model of “successful transformation from a warzone economy.” Hu Lien is the hero, and the distillery is a Taiwan brand success. That narrative is not factually wrong, but it reverses causality. Yeh Hua-cheng’s forced dispossession was not “a minor episode in a success story”; it was the structural starting point of that success story. In Kinmen in 1952, residents had no channel for appeal. During military rule, when civilian property was taken over by the military, whom could the Yeh family have petitioned even if they wanted to protest? By the time warzone administration was abolished in 1992, Kinmen Distillery was already an established Kinmen brand. After democratization in the 2000s, Yeh’s descendants began speaking publicly. But by then, asking the distillery to rewrite its history meant touching the local government’s tax base. How military-rule violence is obscured by economic success finds its most concrete material form in Kinmen in the bottle of Kinmen kaoliang you may have ordered at a stir-fry restaurant.

The Four Characters of 1387: Solid as Metal and Moat, a Mighty Guard at the Sea Gate

If Guningtou is only the beginning of Kinmen’s modern history, Kinmen’s older history goes back to the 20th year of the Hongwu reign in the Ming dynasty.

In 1387, the 20th year of Hongwu, the Marquis of Jiangxia, Zhou Dexing, was ordered to build coastal-defense garrison fortresses along the Fujian coast. He built one on this island, taking the meaning of the eight characters “solid as metal and moat, a mighty guard at the sea gate,” shortened to “Kinmen,” or “Golden Gate”¹⁹. Before that, the island was called “Wuzhou” or “Xianzhou” in Tang and Five Dynasties texts. Only after the Ming built the garrison fortress did the name “Kinmen” become fixed.

During the Tang dynasty, the island was pastureland for horses; legend says Chen Yuan herded horses here. In 959, the sixth year of Xiande under the Later Zhou of the Five Dynasties, Jinjiang County was established under Quanzhou, and Kinmen came under its jurisdiction. During the Song and Yuan dynasties, Quanzhou’s foreign trade flourished, and Kinmen was a key transshipment point; the Yuan established salt fields here. After the Ming built the garrison fortress, large numbers of migrants settled from Quanzhou in Fujian, especially Tong’an County. This is the historical source of Kinmen residents speaking Minnan, with an accent close to Xiamen’s.

In the late Ming and early Qing, Kinmen encountered a man named Koxinga. In 1646, the third year of Shunzhi under the Qing, the 23-year-old Koxinga raised troops in Kinmen and Xiamen against the Qing under the banner of “resisting the Qing and restoring the Ming”²⁰. Near Mingde Lake on Nanci Mountain in Kinmen, there are still burial sites of Ming loyalist officials. The archway before Koxinga Temple in Jincheng Township is one of the most common representative images of Kinmen in CC BY-licensed image collections.

After the Zheng regime surrendered to the Qing, Kinmen entered two relatively peaceful centuries. Many emigrants went to Nanyang, or Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, to make a living, then brought wealth home to build Western-style houses, forming the distinctive “fanzi lou” architectural landscape of the late Qing and early Republican period. Shanhou Village is among the best-preserved examples. Located in Jinsha Township and built in the late Qing and early Republican period, roughly the 1900s to 1920s, it contains 16 to 18 traditional Minnan houses, depending on the source. They were built by the Shanhou Wang family after its members returned from living in Japan, and their architectural vocabulary combines Minnan tradition, Japanese details, and Western decorative elements²¹. The site was listed among the first group of historic monuments in 1979 and opened to the public after restoration in 1998.

Jincheng Mofan Street is evidence from another timeline. Completed in 1924, this old street of two-story connected arcade shophouses has facades blending Minnan, Southeast Asian, and Western styles. Its name came from the Kinmen county magistrate of the time, who praised the street as a “model of construction.” The greatest difference between Mofan Street and old streets of the same period on Taiwan proper under Japanese rule is this: it was built by overseas Chinese returning home, not by Japanese people. Kinmen was never directly ruled under Japan, except for the brief Japanese military occupation of Kinmen and Xiamen during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945. So the time embedded in this street belongs to the grammar of “overseas Chinese time,” a separate axis from “Japanese-rule time.”

As for the distinctive stone lion statues at village entrances, the Wind Lion Gods, there are more than 70 across Kinmen, with estimates ranging from 70 to 90²². Kinmen is flat and exposed to strong winter northeast monsoon winds. Traditional Minnan folk belief holds that “lions bite the wind” and can suppress harmful wind forces, so stone lions were placed at village entrances for protection. Okinawa’s “Shisa” serve a similar function, and some scholars speculate that they may be related to Minnan fishermen migrating to the Ryukyus during the Tang and Song periods. But this remains debated and should not be presented as settled fact.

Wuqiu Speaks a Third Language

If five of Kinmen’s six townships and towns can be reached by car or scooter by residents of Kinmen Island and Lieyu, the sixth is an administrative miracle.

Wuqiu Township belongs to Kinmen County, but geographically it is more than 170 kilometers from Kinmen’s main island, in the sea north of Penghu and south of Matsu²³. To handle county-government affairs in Kinmen, Wuqiu residents first have to take a boat to Taichung Harbor or Keelung Harbor on Taiwan proper, then transfer to Kinmen, a route even more circuitous than going directly to Matsu. Stranger still is the language Wuqiu residents speak. It is different from Kinmen’s Minnan and different from Matsu’s Fuzhou, an Eastern Min language. They speak Puxian, a Min branch that developed in Putian and Xianyou, today’s Putian City in Fujian, and is not mutually intelligible with either Southern Min or Eastern Min²³.

This linguistic fact is the farthest extension of the boundary called “Kinmen County”: one county with three languages, Kinmen Island Minnan, Lieyu Minnan of the same origin but with a somewhat different accent, and Wuqiu Puxian.

It is also the starting point for the difference that most needs to be drawn between Kinmen and Matsu, or Lienchiang County. The two offshore-island counties both implemented warzone administration in 1956, both abolished it in 1992, and both opened Mini Three Links routes in 2001. But their fates shared only the same institutional framework; their bodies grew differently.

Kinmen residents speak the Tong’an-accented variety of Minnan, close to the Minnan spoken by southern Taiwanese and to the Xiamen accent, allowing communication across the sea without difficulty²⁴. Matsu residents speak Fuzhou, an Eastern Min language, broadly similar to Fuzhou spoken in the city of Fuzhou, but completely unintelligible with the Minnan of Taiwan proper. The language difference reflects migration origins: Kinmen migrants mainly came from Tong’an in Quanzhou, Fujian, while Matsu migrants mainly came from Changle and Luoyuan in Fuzhou.

The distance structure is also different. Kinmen is 1.8 kilometers from Xiamen at its closest point, directly facing the Xiamen commercial sphere. Matsu is about 50 kilometers from Mawei in Fuzhou and is not in Fuzhou’s near suburbs. So the everyday density of Kinmen residents going to Xiamen for business, daily goods, and medical care is much higher than that of Matsu residents’ links to Fuzhou.

Their battle histories are even more asymmetrical. Kinmen has Guningtou (1949) plus the August 23 Artillery Battle (1958) plus shelling on odd days and no shelling on even days (1958-1979): two decisive battles plus 21 years of shelling. Matsu had the Battle of Dongquan (1954), the Battle of Yijiangshan (1955, outside Kinmen), and sporadic shelling, but never a land battle on the scale of Guningtou.

Their population scale also differs by an order of magnitude. Kinmen has 145,000 registered residents, while Matsu has only 13,000. Kinmen’s population is more than 10 times Matsu’s. Kinmen has National Quemoy University, founded in 1997 as the first university in Kinmen’s history²⁵. Matsu has no university.

📝 Curator’s note: The common “offshore-island counties” framework bundles Kinmen and Matsu into one concept: “Cold War front line,” “warzone tourism,” “Cross-Strait confrontation.” This compression is convenient for media headlines, but it writes two counties with entirely different bodies into the same résumé. Kinmen is Minnan and rooted in the Kinmen-Xiamen continuum; it leans on the Xiamen commercial sphere, has a large-scale land battle, and had military-control garrisons on the order of 100,000 people. Matsu belongs to the Eastern Min Fuzhou language sphere, is farther from Fuzhou, is an isolated chain of fishing islands, and had a military-control garrison of about 50,000. The two counties are like fraternal twins with the same fate: the same system, different bodies. If you say “Kinmen-Matsu troop withdrawal,” “Kinmen-Matsu lifting of martial law,” or “Kinmen-Matsu Mini Three Links,” remember that behind the plural are two independent counties, two independent languages, and two independent memories of war.

At Four in the Morning, the Boats From Shuitou Pier to Xiamen

Return to the strait from the opening.

On January 2, 2001, the first “trial direct sailing” departed from Kinmen’s Shuitou Pier to Xiamen’s Wutong Pier. This was the earliest trial of the “Three Links” across the Strait, postal, commercial, and transportation links, seven years before the 2008 full Three Links²⁶. From that day to 2024, the Mini Three Links carried roughly 24 million passengers in total. ⚠️ Statistics vary slightly across sources; 24 million is an approximate figure. The voyage takes 45 minutes, and a one-way ticket costs about NT$600 to NT$900, depending on cabin class.

In February 2020, the Mini Three Links were suspended because of COVID-19. They partially resumed in February 2023, limited to Taiwanese nationals, and gradually restored two-way travel from 2024 onward²⁶. For Kinmen residents, the Mini Three Links are everyday logistics rather than a political symbol. Many fresh foods and household goods in Kinmen enter through Xiamen channels; Xiamen’s large department stores and medical facilities are materially attractive to Kinmen residents; many Kinmen residents work across the border in Xiamen, and Taiwanese businesspeople and managers in Xiamen also use the Mini Three Links to travel between the two sides.

This is Kinmen’s most concrete contemporary contradiction.

At four in the morning, there are more speedboats from Shuitou Pier to Xiamen than flights to Songshan. Xiamen is 45 minutes away. In two hours, you can go to Xiamen, eat lunch, and return, including transportation time. But flying to Taipei requires at least more than an hour in the air plus airport transfers, which means half a day. The everyday density determined by geography and the sense of belonging determined by politics pull against each other every day on this 151-square-kilometer island.

Kinmen County’s registered population was about 145,000 in 2024, but the actual resident population is lower. Many Kinmen people work on Taiwan proper while maintaining household registration in Kinmen to receive county-government subsidies and resident share benefits, including annual Kinmen Distillery share distributions to registered residents²⁷. “Having household registration in Kinmen” and “living in Kinmen” are two different things, and this gap is calculated every day in county budgets, elections, and health-insurance subsidies.

On October 25, 2024, the 75th anniversary ceremony for the Battle of Guningtou was held in Kinmen. When County Magistrate Chen Fu-hai spoke the line “cherish peace and defend sovereignty,” the site held the beaches where Communist troops had landed, Zhaishan Tunnel where tourists now queue to kayak, Shuitou Pier with hourly Xiamen speedboats, residents registered in Kinmen but working in Taipei, and Yeh Hua-cheng’s great-grandson, who had not been invited.

When you go to Kinmen, do not look only at Zhaishan Tunnel.

Go to the Guningtou Battle Museum and look at the chronological panels for those 56 hours in 1949. The restored M5A1 tank is parked right there on the beach. Go to the August 23 Artillery Battle Museum and see how the number 474,910 shells becomes 3,132 shells per square kilometer over 44 days. Walk Mofan Street, where overseas Chinese returned home and built Western-style houses in 1924, and remember that the time on this street is not Japanese-rule time. Go to Shanhou Village and see how late Qing and early Republican Minnan houses stacked granite into 16 connected courtyards. Buy a bottle of kaoliang liquor at Kinmen Distillery. The bottle is printed with the four characters “Kinmen Distillery,” but in your mind you know there are three more characters, “Yeh Hua-cheng,” that have not been printed.

Then arrive at Shuitou Pier before four in the morning.

Look at the people waiting to board: Kinmen residents going to Xiamen for dental care, Taiwanese businesspeople heading to factories in Xiamen, tourists curious to taste the Mini Three Links. When the first boat leaves the pier and heads toward Jiaoyu off Xiamen, the sea distance is only 1.8 kilometers. But beneath the surface of those 1.8 kilometers are the beachhead at 2 a.m. on October 25, 1949; Taiwu Mountain at 5:30 p.m. on August 23, 1958; every odd-numbered day of shellfire during the 21 years of shelling on odd days and no shelling on even days from 1958 to 1979; every 10 p.m. curfew during the 36 years of warzone administration from 1956 to 1992; and Yeh Hua-cheng’s distillery, forcibly requisitioned in 1952. Seventy-five years of fate are layered into this 45-minute voyage.

What those 56 hours determined was not only Kinmen. It was Taiwan.

Further Reading

• Lienchiang County — A sibling in the 22 Counties and Cities Series, and the other offshore-island county in Fujian Province. Like Kinmen, it had warzone administration from 1956, abolition in 1992, and the Mini Three Links from 2001; unlike Kinmen, it speaks Eastern Min Fuzhou, lies 50 kilometers from Fuzhou, and had no land battle on the scale of Guningtou. Same system, different body.
• Keelung City — The pilot entry in the 22 Counties and Cities Series: northern Taiwan’s only deepwater port versus Kinmen’s southern coastal-defense fortress, two timelines of Taiwanese ports.
• Penghu County — The third county in the offshore-island group of the 22 Counties and Cities Series. Like Kinmen, it is an outlying island, but it has a history of Japanese rule, allowing comparison with Kinmen’s absence of direct Japanese colonial administration.
• Koxinga — In 1646, he raised troops in Kinmen to resist the Qing and restore the Ming. This decision, launched from Kinmen, later changed Taiwan.
• Chiang Kai-shek — The decision-maker who inscribed “Never Forget Juguang” on Taiwu Mountain in 1958 and ordered Kinmen to be defended to the death in 1949.
• Martial Law Period — Martial law was lifted on Taiwan proper in 1987, but warzone administration in Kinmen and Matsu was not abolished until 1992. Read this piece alongside it to see two versions of martial law.
• Taiwan Strait Crises and the Development of Cross-Strait Relations — The August 23 Artillery Battle is one of the most concrete physical pieces of evidence of a hot war within the Cold War. The “At 5:30 p.m.” section here is a county-level extension of that article.
• Taiwan’s National Defense and Military Modernization — Compare the evolution from 50,000 to 100,000 troops under Kinmen military control to fewer than 10,000 today with the broader trajectory of modernization in Taiwan’s armed forces.
• Taiwan’s Island Geography and Formation — A comparison between Kinmen’s granite geology and the formation mechanisms of other Taiwanese islands.
• Legends of Mazu and Baosheng Dadi — Kinmen’s Minnan religious traditions share origins with Taiwan proper while differing from the legend of the sacred cave at Matsu’s Tianhou Temple.

Image Sources

This article uses six Wikimedia Commons images under CC BY-SA licenses.

The hero image in the frontmatter is “Kinmen Montage” by Sleepingstar (CC BY-SA 4.0), a landscape montage of Kinmen County including old houses, Juguang Tower, military bunkers, Wind Lion Gods, Taiwu Mountain, and other representative imagery.

Five inline images:

• § Looking at Xiamen From Kinmen: Juguang Tower, Kinmen, Taiwan — Photo: (WT-shared) Shoestring, CC BY-SA 4.0, 2009-09. Juguang Tower outside the North Gate of Jincheng Township, a palace-style building completed in 1952.
• § At 5:30 p.m. (August 23 section): Jhaishan Tunnel, Kinmen, Taiwan — Photo: (WT-shared) Shoestring, CC BY-SA 4.0, 2009-09. Zhaishan Tunnel, excavated and completed from 1961 to 1965.
• § The Four Characters of 1387 (Shanhou Village section): The Kinmen cultural village, Kinmen, Taiwan — Photo: (WT-shared) Shoestring, CC BY-SA 4.0, 2009-09. Shanhou Folk Culture Village.
• § The Four Characters of 1387 (Mofan Street section): Mo fan Street, Kinmen, Taiwan — Photo: (WT-shared) Shoestring, CC BY-SA 4.0, 2009-09-21. Jincheng Mofan Street, built in 1924 by overseas Chinese returning home.
• § The Four Characters of 1387 (Wind Lion God section): Wind Lion God in Kimmen — Photo: P95521708, CC BY-SA 4.0, 2018-06-06. A Kinmen Wind Lion God, a village-entrance stone lion used to suppress harmful wind forces.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

References