Noble Ghosts, Empty Graves, and National Trauma: The Tale of Taiyuan’s “Five Hundred Martyrs” in the Chinese Civil War

On 19 February 1951, a state-sponsored funeral took place in Yuanshan, a picturesque spot on the northern hills of Taipei. Near the ruins of a bombed-out Japanese Shinto shrine, the recently exiled Nationalist leaders built a splendid cenotaph to commemorate the “five hundred martyrs of Taiyuan,” courageous individuals who died defending the provincial capital of Shanxi Province against the Chinese Communists. Leading a lengthy procession of government dignitaries and top military brass on this solemn occasion was the sexagenarian Nationalist dictator, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Dressed in his neatly-pressed ceremonial uniform as a five-star general, the stern-faced Chiang placed an honorary wreath upon the tomb of the martyrs. When he stepped back and bowed three times in slow succession to Taiyuan’s fallen heroes, others followed suit promptly and religiously. From that moment onward until the island’s democratization in the late 1980s, the same ceremony was performed every year. Upon the executive order of the Generalissimo, the tale was also written into grade school textbooks. Yet this was largely a fabricated story and there were no real bodies in the grave. This paper examines the cult of the five hundred martyrs and the cenotaph that the Nationalists constructed in their honor. It argues that the cult represented attempts by a vanquished regime to reshape public memory, turning the monumental defeat into a triumph of human spirit; whitewashing the horrendous carnage and mass displacement in 1949. The paper also illustrates how the site and the legend meant different things for different groups of people over time. By presenting the losing side of the story and revealing the repressed memories of war trauma among the common folks, Dominic’s work suggests a rethinking of Beijing’s metanarrative of the civil war being a triumphal revolution against reactionary elites and foreign imperialists.