In a contemporary twist on beating swords into plowshares, blacksmith Wu Tseng-dong (吳增棟) has forged a career fashioning kitchen knives from Chinese artillery shells once fired at his home.
Known locally as “Maestro Wu,” his workshop on Kinmen — just 3km from China — is a vivid reminder of the threat of war continually hanging over Taiwan.
Like many of the older people living on Kinmen, Wu grew up under bombardment.
Photo Sam Yeh, AFP
Even after the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, leaving Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Chinese Communist Party in charge of China and Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in Taiwan, Kinmen continued to be shelled by Mao’s forces.
Wu was born shortly before the worst bombardment in 1958, when nearly half a million shells were fired at Kinmen and other nearby islets over a 44-day period, killing 618 and injuring more than 2,600.
The shells were still falling as late as the 1970s, although by then they were packed with propaganda leaflets rather than explosives.
Wu has vivid childhood memories of hiding in air-raid shelters with his family at night, while scavenging metal fragments by day for scrap.
“I remember the fear we felt at night,” Wu said. “Shelling may look exciting in the movies the more intense it gets, but in reality it’s very dangerous.”
“We tried to pick up as many shells as we could, even climbing the trees to get them, to exchange them for little prizes. It was fun for our childhood, even though we feared the air raids,” he said.
A third-generation blacksmith, Wu learned how to mold metal as a young boy. He followed in the footsteps of his father, who first started turning shells into knives when some Taiwanese soldiers stationed on Kinmen began asking for custom orders.
Most of Wu’s knives are made from the cases of the propaganda shells, which are better preserved, as they did not explode on impact. In the past three decades he estimates that he has bashed out about 400,000 knives.
The old shells are stacked high in Wu’s workshop, which has become something of a draw for tourists. Visitors excitedly snap pictures as Wu methodically sculpts a glowing hunk of metal into a cleaver.
Kinmen had become a popular destination for tourists from China — at least until the COVID-19 pandemic shut the nation’s borders.
Direct transportation links were launched in 2008 when ties were warmer, but cross-strait relations have chilled after the election of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of the Democratic Progressive Party in 2016.
Chinese jets have begun crossing into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone at an unprecedented rate and Wu said that he feels tensions are now at their highest — probably even more than in the mid-1990s when China fired ballistic missiles into the Taiwan Strait in a bid to deter the nation’s first direct presidential election.
China’s threats are something Taiwanese have long had to live with, but Wu says many of those in Kinmen know first-hand what conflict looks like and never want to see it return.
“The people don’t want war,” he said. “It’s very brutal and we in Kinmen experienced it during the 823 Artillery Bombardment [in 1958], having relatives and friends killed or injured.”
“I hope the two sides can deal with each other peacefully... It is up to the wisdom of both governments,” he said.
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