FOR THE FIRST 20 YEARS of his life, Wu Tseng-dong lived in a war zone. Growing up on Kinmen Island, a small Taiwanese territory four miles off the coast of mainland China, bombs were a constant threat. “It was terrifying. We were always panic-stricken,” Wu says. “We had to scout out places to hide when the bombs dropped. A big tree is good because it can block the impact, but the best place to hide was inside a gutter.”For much of the 20th century, Kinmen was a battleground. A Cold War flashpoint between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China, or Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army shelled the tiny island of Kinmen repeatedly. Beginning on August 23, 1958, when Wu was barely a year old, roughly 479,500 bombs were dropped by mainland China on Kinmen over the span of 44 days, an event later called the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. “The only time they stopped bombing was during meal times,” Wu says, noting how his mother would seize those moments of quiet to run out of their bunker and into the fields to harvest sweet potatoes to eat before the shelling resumed.
Source: The Blacksmith Turning Decades of Chinese Bombs Into Kitchen Tools – Gastro Obscura
