The South China Morning Post reported that Taiwan will remove statues of Chiang Kai-shek in all public places.
Members of the Chiang Kai-shek family will always remember April 25, 2024, and today Taiwan announced that it will demolish more than 760 statues of Chiang Kai-shek on the island, and from the 25th, Chiang's political and economic legacy on the island of Taiwan will be completely erased by Taiwan.
What does this mean?
It means that Wanwan will erase the memory of the mainland, it means that the influence of the Kuomintang in Taiwan is getting smaller and smaller, and it means that Wanwan may go further and further on the road of Taiwan independence!
So, what were the possessions that Chiang Kai-shek brought to the island of Taiwan?
More than 14 million taels of gold
In 1948, with the smooth progress of the three major battles, the Kuomintang army was defeated. With the defeat already decided, everyone in the Kuomintang army was in danger, and Chiang Kai-shek, who was in internal and external difficulties, had to start paving a way back for himself.
After finalizing his plan to flee to Taiwan, the first thing Chiang Kai-shek did was to smuggle all the gold he had hidden on the mainland to Taiwan.
According to relevant historical records, 495,000 taels of gold in the treasury of Wang's puppet regime were confiscated by the Chiang Kai-shek government, and in August 1948, the Nanjing Nationalist Government began to sell gold and silver coupons and purchase gold from the private sector.
In just three months, the Nationalist Government exchanged a total of 1.663 million taels of gold. Moreover, in the Anti-Japanese War, the United States sponsored 400 million US dollars in construction expenses in order to support the establishment of military airports for the national army, of which 220 million US dollars were used by Chiang Kai-shek to buy more than 6 million taels of gold. After deducting their consumption in these two years, by the end of 1948, there were at least 4 million taels of gold left in the central bank's treasury.
It is said that Chiang Kai-shek's first shipment of gold from Shanghai to Taiwan was 2.57 million taels. In order to avoid the fermentation of the gold smuggling incident, Chiang Kai-shek sent Chiang Ching-kuo to coordinate the relationship between the military and political circles.
After Chiang Kai-shek officially went into the field, he used planes to transport nearly 600,000 taels of gold in three installments. In May 1949, under the order of Chiang Kai-shek, Tang Enbo, commander of the Shanghai garrison, personally sent people to "rob" 198,000 taels of gold and 1.2 million silver dollars from the central bank, and shipped them to Taiwan one after another.
From the above data, it can be roughly calculated that the Kuomintang authorities smuggled at least 4.26 million taels of gold from the mainland, and some of the gold accounts are so complicated and chaotic that it is impossible to accurately count them.
2. Cultural relics and antiques
At the end of 1947, the military defeat of the Kuomintang was a foregone conclusion, and the Nationalist government began to secretly transport national treasures to Taiwan. Hang Liwu, the person in charge of the material transfer agency, decided to focus on the 800 boxes of precious cultural relics in the Palace Museum, and select cultural relics and documents from other places. After a year-long rush to ship, a total of 5,522 boxes of cultural relics were shipped to Taiwan. These cultural relics include jade cabbage, flesh-shaped stones, Mao Gongding, "Manuscript of Sacrifice to Nephew", "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map", "Sunny Post when the Snow is Fast", "Cold Food Post" and other precious national treasures.
After New Year's Day in 1949, the Kuomintang government accelerated the pace and chartered the "Haihu" of China Merchants to rush the second batch, totaling 3,502 boxes, which was the largest batch of cultural relics relocated to Taiwan. This batch of cultural relics includes a large number of rare books, such as the famous Wenyuan Pavilion "Siku Quanshu". The books were originally placed on the shelves, and the participants then nailed wooden boxes and set up a catalog, and it took two months to put them together.
On January 29, 1949, the "Kunlun" set sail from Xiaguan with the third batch of cultural relics. Among the 1,248 boxes of national treasures is Wang Xizhi's "Sunny Post When the Snow is Fast", which is famous at home and abroad.
There are a total of 2,972 boxes of cultural relics in three batches, although only 1/4 of the cultural relics in Nanjing are stored, but most of them are the best of the best. "Fast Snow Sunny Post" is the Eastern Jin Dynasty book sage Wang Xizhi family left to later generations only three authentic works, Qianlong Ye is in his treasure pavilion "Sanxi Hall", the "Fast Snow Sunny Post" as the first of the three Xi treasures, the love for it can be seen.
According to records, the Kuomintang shipped a total of 5,496 boxes of cultural relics from the mainland to Taiwan, and these cultural relics are the most precious and distinctive fine products since ancient times, which is even more shocking.
3. Troop strength
After the three major battles in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek knew that the general trend was gone, so he withdrew to Taiwan with a large amount of gold reserves of his army.
When he went to Taiwan, he still thought in his heart that this was only a temporary "expedient measure", and sooner or later, he would return to the mainland with the Kuomintang counteroffensive, but he did not expect that this retreat would be a lifetime, and he would never be able to set foot on the mainland again.
But at the same time, when Chiang Kai-shek left in such a hurry, the amount of property and troops he took with him became a curious point, how much gold and jewels he took with him, and how many troops did they have left at the end of the crossbow?
In addition to the more than 600,000 troops who retreated with the Kuomintang, there are about 1 million officers at all levels and their families together, which shows how much trouble the Kuomintang spent when it withdrew to Taiwan.
At that time, the situation of the Kuomintang was basically a sure thing, and many generals of the Kuomintang stationed in various places chose to revolt, and even Fu Zuoyi chose to defect to the Communist Party.
Then why did more than 600,000 troops choose to follow Chiang Kai-shek in "retreating" to Taiwan? If it is because those Kuomintang officers went to Taiwan because they had the same idea of counterattacking the mainland as Chiang Kai-shek, then what did these soldiers do?
In fact, these soldiers did not really follow Chiang Kai-shek's retreat to Taiwan, most of them were involuntarily, some of them were captured and joined the army, and some wanted to leave but could not go, so they had to follow to Taiwan.
4. Literati and masters
The ten masters that Chiang Kai-shek brought with him when he retreated to Taiwan were:
1. Hu Shi, writer, thinker, philosopher;
2. Liang Shiqiu, writer and translator;
3. Zhang Daqian, painter and calligrapher;
4. Kong Decheng, the 77th grandson of Confucius, the last generation of Yan Shenggong;
5, Zhang Enpu, the 63rd generation of Heavenly Master Dao;
6. Qian Mu, historian, educator, and civil state;
7. Huang Junbi, artist, educator and painter;
8. Fu Sinian, historian and classical writer;
9. Mei Yiqi, former president of Tsinghua University, philosopher;
10. Lin Yutang, scholar and writer. Among them, Zhang Daqian is a famous painter and calligrapher in modern China, and his works enjoy a high reputation in the world. He is good at landscapes, flowers and birds, characters and other themes, especially for splashing ink landscapes and splashing colorful lotus. His works are full of a strong oriental atmosphere, and he is also an outstanding calligrapher, known as the "Grass Sage Passing Lamp".