Xiamen and Kinmen

I visited Xiamen en route to Singapore from Anxi. Xiamen is a beautiful city that faces the Taiwan Straits. However, the first thing that I did in Xiamen was to take a ferry and observe the Kinmen archipelago from a distance onboard. The ferry crossed the green indicator below that marks the boundary between China and Taiwan.

I was overwhelmed with joy when the “青天白日”flag greeted me from afar. I had wanted to salute it but I reckoned that if I did, I might not have returned home alive.

The “三民主义统一中国”tablet on the Dadan island was erected by Chiang Ching-kuo to rally all Chinese under the principles expounded by Sun Yat-Sen. The words were big enough to be seen using a pair of binoculars along the Xiamen coastline. He was frustrated at the fact that Taiwan had been expelled from the United Nations.

Prior to this, Chiang Kai-Shek had erected a tablet that says “还我河山”on the Lesser Kinmen island in Yue Fei fashion after the Chinese Civil War. To counter both the tablets erected by the father-and-son duo, China constructed at the beach a big one that says “一国两制统一中国”. It is interesting to see how China and Taiwan have communicated via silent messages indicated on gigantic tablets.

The Kinmen archipelago is smaller than Singapore in its combined land mass. However, it had for the past 60 years experienced massive shellings and repulsed three major invasions from the mainland. This is remarkable for an archipelago that seems too small to be defendable. In fact, Kinmen had protected Taiwan so well that the whole course of history was changed to reflect the status quo that we now see in the Taiwan Straits.

厦门和金门，两地近在咫尺，却又遥不可及。

两门遥相望，却又紧闭门户，不留丝毫缝隙。