Taiwan’s front line: Kinmen Island, scarred by civil war with China, braces as tensions build

The Chinese government has vowed to take Taiwan by force if necessary. The island of Kinmen still bears the scars of a bloody civil war that raged for 20 years.

Wu Tseng-dong prides himself on making something good out of something terrible. The blacksmith runs a workshop on Taiwan’s Kinmen Island, where he forges household knives made from old Chinese bombs.

“Typically, the steel from these types of shells is of very good quality, so it is quite stable,” he explained, placing a panel into a fiery furnace before hammering it into shape.

Wu doesn’t need to worry about running short of raw materials. Dozens of artillery shells are piled high next to the furnace — some of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese bombs that landed on Kinmen decades ago.

“I was only a few months old when the artillery battle started, but the fighting continued for many years,” the 66-year-old told Global News.

For seven decades, this small island of around 70,000 residents has been caught in the middle of a geopolitical power struggle. Kinmen is part of Taiwan, but is located hundreds of kilometres from Taipei, while just a few kilometres across the strait, visible through the haze, is mainland China.

In 1949, this island was the front line in a bloody civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists, which saw Kinmen separated from the Chinese mainland and become part of Taiwan.

The Nationalists fortified the island with as many as 100,000 soldiers, erecting hundreds of anti-landing stakes that still dot the coastline today, rusted and encrusted with barnacles.

Wu said the fighting continued for 20 years. The Chinese military typically shelled the island at night — his family and others would squeeze together in cramped shelters and bunkers, waiting for the bombing to stop.