On December 1, 1948, at the Bank of China terminal on the Bund in Shanghai, a team of porters marched on the road not far from the Chinachem [mào] Hotel (now the Peace Hotel), and they carried heavy boxes to the "Starfish" freighter in groups of two under the care of armed military police. After the goods were delivered, the freighter quietly sailed away.
The next day, the British newspaper Zi Lin Xi Bao published an explosive news: the gold of China's national treasury was quietly transported by the porters in the most primitive way...
Is this news true?
More than 60 years later, the diary of Wu Songqing, who was involved in the matter at that time, was published, revealing the truth of the incident in its entirety.
Wu Songqing was then the director of the Finance Department of the Joint Logistics Headquarters of the Nationalist Army, and his duties were equivalent to Chiang Kai-shek's "Mr. Bookkeeper". He recorded in the "Secret Record of Military Expenditures" that after the failure of the peace talks between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, Chiang Kai-shek ordered that a huge amount of treasury gold, silver dollars, and US dollars be transferred from Shanghai to Taiwan, preparing to "start another stove" and wait for an opportunity to "counterattack the mainland."
On October 9, 1948, Chiang Kai-shek summoned Yu Hongjun, then president of the central bank, to discuss the transfer of gold inventories. On November 22, Chiang Kai-shek wrote in his diary:
"Choose another simple environment, narrow the scope, fundamentally transform, start another stove is not a work, the defeat of the current situation, do not think it is a matter of expectations."
Chiang Kai-shek's so-called simple environment refers to Taiwan, and at this time he is ready to abandon the mainland and "start a new stove."
After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Chiang Kai-shek only had less than 30,000 taels of gold left, and then seized 495,000 taels of the Wang puppet government, issued "golden yuan coupons", and looted 1.84 million taels from the hands of the people.
In addition, during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the United States owed China $400 million for the construction of military airports, of which the Nationalist government purchased more than 6 million taels of gold for 220 million yuan, stripped of various expenses, and by the end of 1948 there were still more than 4 million taels left.
In November of that year, Mr. Yu received a secret telegram from Chiang Kai-shek asking him to ship half of his gold inventory to Taiwan within a week.
As for why Chiang Kai-shek chose Taiwan as his final residence, we previously wrote in another article, "The Real Reason for Chiang Kai-shek's Retreat to Taiwan: Was It Sun Yat-sen's Testament, Or Was It Li Zongren's Persecution?" " has been said, and will not be repeated here.
Gold was Chiang Kai-shek's capital for Taiwan and a new stove, so he was careful to leave the matter to trusted people to handle it—Chiang Ching-kuo was responsible for communicating and escorting the army, Soong Ziwen was responsible for dispatching transport ships, and Yu Hongjun was responsible for coordinating communication between the treasury and the "central bank".
Yu Hongjun's confidential secretary, He Shanyuan, said that during the transportation of gold, "all actions were kept extremely confidential" and that "the military imposed special martial law and cut off traffic, so that no one outside knew about it at that time."
As planned, the Starfish shipped away 2.6 million taels of gold and 4 million silver dollars and arrived in Keelung, Taiwan, on December 4, 1948.
Things are done confidentially, but the movement is so big, how can no one know? British journalist George Wyne was one of the witnesses.
On the night the gold was secretly loaded on the ship, George Wyn, a British journalist living at the Chinachem Hotel, stood by the window and looked out. The view is excellent, with the side gate of the Bank of China and the Yuanmingyuan intersection to the west and the Huangpu River to the east.
At this time, George saw that in the side door of the Bank of China, one porter after another came out, or two people in a box, or two boxes for one person, transporting things out of the bank. Looking at the Huangpu River, a 500-ton customs smuggling ship docked on the dock.
Shanghai Yuanmingyuan Road
According to the reporter's intuition, he thought that such a small and seemingly heavy box must be valuable gold.
So George immediately wrote a report to make the matter of Chiang Kai-shek's removal of gold known to the world. Subsequently, British newspapers, Reuters, Hong Kong's "China Business Daily" and other media quickly reprinted the news.
When the news came, the "golden yuan coupons" that had already depreciated by 500 times made it worse, quickly collapsed, and completely fell into a state of loss of control.
On December 24, 1948, the central bank had a "gold run massacre", and the citizens who were out of control rushed to the counter in a frenzy, colliding and stampede, killing 7 people and injuring 50 people.
Chiang Kai-shek could not take much care of it and sped up the speed of transporting gold.
On January 1, 1949, 600,000 taels of gold were shipped out of Shanghai in the name of military expenses, of which 500,000 taels were shipped to Taiwan.
In the early morning of January 20, four ships carrying 900,000 taels of gold, 30 million silver dollars, and $70 million sailed out of the Bund in Shanghai, and 500 boxes of silver dollars could not fit and were left ashore.
By February 6, 1949, in addition to the 200,000 taels of gold left in the Shanghai treasury, Taiwan already had 3,004,000 taels of gold, accounting for more than 60% of the treasury's gold inventory.
The national treasury was empty, and it was only discovered nearly a month after Li Zongren took office.
On February 17, Li Zongren ordered Liu Jingyun, the incoming president of the "central bank," to ship the gold back, but Liu Did not reply. Li Zongren again wrote to Chen Cheng, asking for the gold to be shipped back, and Chen Cheng replied: "Please find the central bank to coordinate."
Li Zongren had no choice. Until he left Nanjing on April 23, he could not see a large pile of gold.
When Li Zongren left, Tang Enbo, who was ordered to stay in Shanghai, received a secret mission: to transport the remaining 200,000 taels of gold in Shanghai and 60,000 of the 220,000 Shanghai nationalist troops to Taiwan.
This is probably Chiang Kai-shek's last concern on the mainland. In mid-May, he wrote five handwritten letters to Tang Enbo, asking him to leave 20,000 taels of gold and 1 million silver dollars, and the rest to be shipped to Taiwan.
At the end, Chiang Kai-shek made another change of day, sending Yu Hongjun to fly from Hong Kong to Shanghai, so that Tang Enbo left 5,000 taels of gold and 300,000 silver dollars, and the rest was transported to Taiwan.
In the war-torn era, who is not moved by this large amount of gold?
The boss of the China Merchants ship responsible for transporting gold saw the wealth and went so far as to propose to the staff of the China Merchants Bureau who was responsible for escorting the gold to privately divide the gold: "There are many small islands from Shanghai to Taiwan, how about we deflect the rudder slightly, and how about going to the small island to be a treasure and silver island owner?" ”
The same thing happened in Xiamen.
One day, when one of the freighters of the Xiamen Merchants Bureau was retreating to Taiwan, the leading army asked everyone to assemble urgently on the deck, only to see a soldier in handcuffs and be escorted up. The captain shouted and asked, "If you steal one less gold brick in the vault, did you steal it?" ”
The soldier nodded in acknowledgement and gave a detailed account of the crime. Then, gunfire rang out and the soldiers fell.
After the liberation of Shanghai, the treasury was completely empty. According to the shanghai local history, after the national government withdrew, the gold in all the banks in Shanghai added up to only 6180 taels, less than 1% of the original inventory.
After Chiang Kai-shek retired to Taiwan, he stopped the circulation of gold yuan coupons in Taiwan, began to issue new Taiwan dollars, and exchanged them for old Taiwan dollars at 1:40,000.
In order to make the new Taiwan dollar stand firm, Chen Cheng opened a gold savings deposit, that is, the people can exchange the new Taiwan dollar for gold, so that the new Taiwan dollar can slowly replace the gold yuan and the old Taiwan dollar and circulate in Taiwan.
According to the data, the gold shipped to Taiwan helped the Kuomintang government support the difficult years of its first arrival in Taiwan, when almost all the expenditure depended on the gold.
Chiang Kai-shek's confidential secret Zhou Hongtao wrote in his memoirs that the largest consumption of savings was military expenditure, an average of 180,000 taels per month. By June 1950, Taiwan's gold inventory could only support it for three months.
The 600,000-strong army was like a huge gold-devouring beast, quickly devouring the gold that Chiang Kai-shek had looted from the mainland.
Just when Chiang Kai-shek was frowning, the Korean War broke out, and the United States signed a defense assistance plan with Chiang Kai-shek, resuming 15 years of economic assistance to Taiwan, with a total of 1.5 billion US dollars. As a result, Taiwan's economy was able to get rid of its predicament and develop rapidly, becoming the "Four Little Tigers" of Asia.
In June 1950, Chiang Kai-shek demanded that Taiwan's "state treasury" collect and seal all gold shipped from the mainland. At this point, JinJin, who assisted Chiang Kai-shek through the difficult years, finally withdrew from the stage of history.
In May 2008, relevant Kuomintang personnel visited the "national treasury" and saw 13.61 million taels of gold quietly placed there, of which 1.08 million taels were marked as from the mainland. And this gold has not been used since June 1950.
"Entering the vault is like entering a golden mountain!" Lu Xiuyan, a reporter for Taiwan's China Television Corporation and now the mayor of Taichung City, said.
Decades have passed, cross-strait relations are constantly evolving, and this gold seems to be waiting for the arrival of a new era...