KINMEN LAST FRONTLINE OF FREE CHINA

In this first of a two-part series, read how when faced with total defeat, China's Nationalists held on to a small island off the Fujian coast and defended it at all costs

- MIGUEL MIRANDA

The long and ruinous Chinese Civil War was supposed to have ended in 1949 with the Nationalists' lasting defeat. Reality, as always, was far more complicated. The decision made by the US-backed dictator Chiang Kai-shek to retreat and make the island of Formosa his stronghold was a questionable attempt at resetting the war's momentum. What happened instead was the Communists were victorious in southern China and the struggle shifted from the land to the sea. The defence of Formosa, whose Chinese name Taiwan was rarely used at the time, required a perimeter in the form of the offshore islands. Most precarious among these was the fishing community that inhabited Quemoy, or Kinmen.

Encircled by a sandy shoreline and studded by rocks, the island had the unfortunate distinction of being 93 miles (150km) away from Formosa itself and just several miles away from the Fujian coast of mainland China, well within range of communist batteries and surveillance. Since 1948 the reeling Nationalists planned, albeit in haphazard fashion, on withdrawing from the mainland and to scatter their army's veteran divisions among China's coastal or offshore islands. By April the following year it was reported that nearly two million Nationalist soldiers and civilians had evacuated to Formosa.