A letter from Taiwan’s Cold War ruins

IN the strictest sense, Matsu is not Taiwan. That much became clear as soon as I stepped off the ramp of the ferry. The Taiwanese soldiers that disembarked with me spoke Mandarin and their native language, a dialect descended from the one spoken in southern Fujian, where most Taiwanese can trace their ancestry. The locals, by contrast, spoke a language more similar to the dialect spoken in northern Fujian. The stark linguistic divide hinted at the fact that the residents of the Matsu Island group, situated between Taiwan and the Fujian Province of mainland China, have more cultural affinity with the Chinese in the city of Fuzhou just across the strait than with the Taiwanese.

It was the geopolitical maelstrom of the Chinese Civil War, from 1946 to 1949, that irreversibly broke Matsu’s traditional ties to the mainland and bound its fate to that of distant Taiwan. When Mao Zedong’s Red Army swept Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist-ruled Republic of China off the mainland in 1949, Chiang’s armies retreated to a chain of offshore islands that stretched from the coast of Zhejiang to Hainan Island. Matsu was soon transformed from a sleepy archipelago of no political significance to a major flashpoint of the Cold War.