Guide
In 1949, China's destiny reached an unprecedentedly important juncture. At a time when the rivers and mountains were changing color and the rivers and mountains were changing hands, Chiang Kai-shek, who was helpless, accelerated the implementation of the strategy of retreating to Taiwan, and secretly ordered that the gold in the Shanghai vault of the "central bank" be secretly transported to Taiwan, and millions of taels of gold were continuously transported out...
01
Why was Chiang Kai-shek still able to transport gold after he left the wilderness?
In November 1948, on the battlefield on both sides of the Huai River, the two armies of the Kuomintang and the Communists launched a life-and-death armed battle. The Kuomintang army was overwhelmed and suffered heavy casualties; once the important town of Xuzhou was lost, the gateway to Jiangnan was already open. The primary symptom of a government on the brink of bankruptcy is soaring prices and a total collapse of the economy.
At this time, the Kuomintang army still controlled the area south of the Yangtze River, but Chiang Kai-shek was "afraid that Beijing and Shanghai would be lost", so he was anxious to transport Shanghai's gold and silver dollars in batches to Taiwan, which had not yet been affected by the war. The remaining small amounts of gold and silver were scattered in Chengdu, Guangzhou, and other places, exclusively for the military and government organs to pay salaries and military expenses.
At the beginning of the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the National Government had less than 30,000 taels of gold left in the treasury, and then confiscated 495,000 taels of the "treasury" of the Wang puppet regime, and issued "gold coupons" and received 1.84 million taels from the common 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 bought more than $6 million in gold for $220 million. Minus the expenses, by the end of 1948, the total amount of gold in the treasury was more than 4 million taels.
In August 1948, Shanghai citizens poured into the banks to exchange for the newly issued gold yuan bills issued by the Nationalist government.
At the end of November 1948, a secret telegram was rushed to the office of Yu Hongjun (then president of the central bank), asking him to transport half of the treasury gold to Taiwan within a week. For Chiang Kai-shek, the gold of the national treasury is the only capital for him to base himself on Taiwan and start a new stove, and he must be cautious. At this time, he could only rely on his relatives and confidants: the eldest son, Chiang Ching-kuo, was responsible for communicating and escorting the army, Song Ziwen was responsible for dispatching the transport ships of the General Administration of Customs, and Yu Hongjun's responsibility was to coordinate the official documents of the "central bank" and the treasury.
Yu Hongjun, then governor of the Central Bank
He Shanyuan, a confidential aide to Yu Hongjun, recalled that during the period when he was ordered to plan the secret transportation of gold, Yu Hongjun "wrote, wrote, printed, and sealed all official documents, and was appointed by one person, that is, in a small room behind the president's office."
By the end of the day, "the military imposed special martial law and cut off traffic," so "no one outside knew about it at that time." The Starfish and others were planned to load 2.6 million taels of gold and 4 million silver dollars. It was an extremely classified gold shipment operation, with no warship escorts. The Starfish sailed for a day and a night, and finally arrived safely at Pier 2 of Keelung Port on December 4. Several large trucks have been waiting for a long time, and after unloading in an hour or so, the large trucks will be escorted by the Central Bank of China and head toward Taipei.
The gold shipment operation on the night of December 1 shocked all of China, and the people of Shanghai Beach were panicked. After the news was reported, the "Golden Yuan Coupons", which had been depreciated by 500 times in only half a year, were now like an avalanche and completely out of control. However, Chiang Kai-shek could no longer take care of this, the military expenditure was huge, the war situation was becoming more and more eroded, and Li Zongren and other political enemies were pressing down step by step, prompting him to be determined to race against time to step up the transportation of gold.
The gold yuan coupons fell like an avalanche, and Shanghai was even more panicked, and within a few days there was a "gold run tragedy".
On January 1, 1949, 600,000 taels of gold left shanghai by sea, of which 500,000 taels were secretly transported to Taiwan. At this time, it was the Battle of Huaihai, and the Kuomintang army was completely defeated; in the midst of internal and external difficulties, Chiang Kai-shek knew that the situation was a foregone conclusion. To this end, he must formulate a legal passage in advance before he can continue to transport the treasury gold after going to the field.
His approach was to allocate advances for the remaining treasury gold in the name of military expenditure. However, the financial community is divided on this, fearing that this move will lead to an extreme emptiness of the national treasury, induce a run, and the consequences will be unimaginable. Therefore, Jiang specially sent Chiang Ching-kuo to Shanghai to contact Yu Hongjun to communicate with the military to implement transportation capacity and safety guarantees, and at the same time to put pressure on those who held opposition in the financial circles. The two sides finally reached a compromise: a "draft treaty" was drawn up, first "advanceing" half of the military expenditure from the national treasury.
On January 11, Wu Songqing (note: then deputy commander-in-chief of the Joint Logistics Headquarters) received instructions to handle the relevant draft agreement on the conversion of gold into military expenses. This is the key to Being able to transport the treasury gold after Chiang Kai-shek leaves the field.
02
The gold shipped to Xiamen became Chiang Kai-shek's private treasury
At 6:00 a.m. on January 20, 1949, when the Navy's ships "Haiping", "Meipeng" and "Kunlun" left the Bund dock carrying 900,000 taels of gold, 30 million silver dollars and 70 million US dollars, in a hurry, 500 boxes of silver dollars were not loaded, so there were only 18 hours left before Chiang Kai-shek went down. Prior to this, Chiang Kai-shek had specially appointed his bodyguard Shi Zude as the commander of the guards, and he arrived in Xiamen first to make a front stop for the transportation of gold. By the beginning of February, the task of transporting gold was largely complete.
Silver ingots destined for Taiwan are waiting to be loaded
Whenever Chiang Kai-shek encountered bad luck, he would always return to his hometown in Fenghua Xikou Town, Zhejiang Province, to recuperate, and this time was no exception. The difference is that this time he is facing a drastic change that is about to change the dynasty. However, the two batches of gold on January 10 (of which 100,000 taels) and the 20th were not shipped directly to Taiwan, but were transported to the underground vault of the Bank of China (now located at No. 30, Huangyan Road, Gulangyu Island) on gulangyu Island, which was located on the beautiful Gulangyu Island at that time.
What puzzled posterity is that the two batches of gold shipped to Gulangyu Island in Xiamen were not included in the gold revenue and expenditure accounts of Taiwan's "central bank" at all. Taiwan's "Ministry of National Defense" archives also lack the 1949 military budget and expenditure data. The central bank's gold was transferred out of the national treasury "justifiably" and stored in Wu Songqing's personal account - Wu became Chiang's "white glove".
Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-kuo and Wu Songqing, former Director of Finance and Quartermaster of the Kuomintang Army (second from right)
Taiwan's archives show that on January 27, 1949, the 1317 boxes of archives delivered by the central bank were sent to the "Taiping Ship" from Shanghai to the port of Keelung in Taiwan, which sank in the sea off Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province, and 5 central bank staff and thousands of boxes of central bank files were sunk with the ship.
In July 1949, gold stored in Xiamen continued to be shipped to Taiwan. Since the gold transportation from Xiamen to Taipei was mostly by plane, there were many witnesses to the Air Force in that year. Yang Rongzhi was then the captain of the 20th Brigade of the Air Transport Team. He said: "It was the spring of 1949, the situation on the mainland was very critical, and the Twentieth Brigade was ordered to carry personnel and materials, and the transport plane traveled to and from the mainland and Taiwan many times before completing the task. ”
It is now the Xiamen Monetary culture center
Liu Cuncai was also indirectly involved in the task of transporting gold. In 1949, Liu Cuncai arrived in Taiwan as an exiled student to assist in the defense of Hsinchu and served as a sergeant clerk in the war room of the Eleventh Squadron, responsible for registering the time and content of the flight mission. He pointed out that at that time, the two air force transport brigades of the "Nationalist Army" had an airlift capacity of nearly a hundred aircraft, and the transport planes were empty when they set sail, and when they returned to Taiwan, they were full of personnel and materials. The so-called "materials" are actually gold and silver dollars, but the register is always written as "materials".
The pilot who returned from the mission revealed that the gold and silver dollars were carried back, and due to the urgency of the situation, the pilot also saw that the silver dollars that were too late to be shipped were spilled on the ground... The Twentieth Brigade was therefore known as the "Golden Brigade".
Li Zongren has been trying to transport the gold back to the mainland
On February 6, 1949, the Nanjing Ming Palace Airport and the Shanghai Jiangwan Airport, which belonged to the Kuomintang Air Force Transport Brigade, received emergency mobilization orders at the same time. At nightfall, the transport fleets of the two places took off at the same time, carrying 554,000 taels of gold straight to Taipei Songshan Airport. At this point, the Nanjing treasury has been clearly empty, and the Shanghai treasury has only 200,000 taels. Taiwan already had 60% of the total amount of gold in the national treasury at that time, a total of 3.004 million taels.
On February 8, Chiang Kai-shek heard that Li Zongren was trying to control the central bank, and immediately sent his attendant secretary Zhou Hongtao to Shanghai. Zhou Hongtao inquired that at this time, most of the central bank's deposits had been transported to Xiamen and Taiwan as scheduled, and "only 200,000 taels of deposits in Shanghai" were deposited, and Chiang Kai-shek put his mind at ease.
By the time Mr. Lee discovered that the treasury gold had been emptied, it was February 17, nearly a month after he took office as president. Li Zongren sent a letter to Chen Cheng, demanding that the gold be returned and mobilizing the Gui legislators to exert pressure. Chen replied that "this matter belongs to the jurisdiction of the central bank, please find the central bank to coordinate." Li looked for the "central bank" again, and the answer was that "gold is now in safe custody and should not be shipped out again." But Li Zongren never gave up on this gold, and even sent a memorandum to Jiang, but Jiang ignored it.
Li Zongren was unable to transport the gold back to the mainland until the early morning of April 23, 1949, when the sound of gunfire was heard everywhere on the outskirts of Nanjing, and the "acting president" took the "Chasing Clouds" special plane and left. Tang Enbo, the "commander-in-chief of the Beijing-Shanghai-Hangzhou Garrison" who was responsible for guarding The Greater Shanghai, in addition to leading a 300,000-strong army to support half of the rivers and mountains, also had a secret mission: to transport out the remaining 200,000 taels of gold in Shanghai stocks and 60,000 of the 220,000 Shanghai garrisons.
Tombaugh
In mid-May, Jiang sent Tang five handwritten letters in succession, in which he clearly instructed, "In addition to the necessary amounts for maintaining finance in Shanghai, 20,000 taels of gold and 1 million yuan of silver yuan should be retained." In addition to the handwritten letter, Jiang also sent Yu Hongjun to fly from Hong Kong to Shanghai to secretly meet Tang Enbo. Subsequently, Tang personally left a note asking the central bank to "save the 5,000 taels of gold and 300,000 silver dollars temporarily, and the rest will be stored in the designated safe place." The so-called safe place refers to Taiwan.
With time pressed and limited ships, Tombaugh decided to use trusted military ships and China Merchants ships. In addition to the "Hanmin Ship" of the China Merchants Bureau, there were also military ships "Mei peng" and "Zhongji ship", which were also loaded with gold and were also full of soldiers and dependents. After two days and two nights, the shipment was finally completed.
After the first batch of 2.6 million taels of gold, where did it go? The biggest sum was that on June 15, 1949, Chen Cheng, under the instructions of Chiang Kai-shek, transferred 800,000 taels of gold and $10 million of foreign exchange from the "central bank" to the Bank of Taiwan as import trade funds, and issued and circulated the first batch of New Taiwan dollars (that is, the reserve of the initial issuance of NT$200 million) that did not have any linkage with gold yuan bills.
But at first, the people of Taiwan were skeptical about the large amount of gold being shipped. In order to prove that the government has sufficient gold issuance reserves, Chen Cheng commissioned a group of silver buildings on Hengyang Road in Taiwan to open gold savings deposits, that is, new Taiwan dollars can be exchanged for gold. The NT dollar thus gained credibility, made people's hearts stable, and laid the foundation for Taiwan's economic stability for more than a decade. It is no exaggeration to say that this batch of gold was the fulcrum of the difficult years when the Kuomintang government first arrived in Taiwan.
Source: New Weekly