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From Cold War relics to hot-selling souvenirs of peace: Maestro Wu’s Kinmen Knives

In the three decades after China’s civil war ended in 1949, the residents of Kinmen lived under constant fear.

The sounds of shelling were omnipresent across this group of islands that are controlled by Taiwan but located just a few miles off the southeastern coast of mainland China.

After the civil war ended, the triumphant Communist – who founded the People’s Republic on the mainland and expelled the defeated Nationalists to Taiwan – launched a series of artillery bombardments in an attempt to seize the islands, though the government in Taipei retained control. Kinmen authorities estimated that up to a million shells landed on the islands during the Cold War.

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