Laonong River Resettlement Villages

Four villages on the stony floodplain of the Laonong River (荖濃溪) along the border between Ligang, Pingtung and Meinong, Kaohsiung. Approximately 600 fighters of the Yunnan People’s Anti-Communist Volunteer Army (雲南人民反共志願軍) and their families were settled here in December 1961. These were remnants of Nationalist units that withdrew into northern Burma after the loss of Yunnan in 1949 and fought on along the frontier for a decade, until defeat by combined Burmese and Chinese forces brought their evacuation to Taiwan under Operation National Thunder (國雷演習).

Officers were assigned to Xinguo and enlisted men to Dingyuan in Pingtung, single men to Jingzhong and widows to Chenggong on the Kaohsiung side, each village named for a figure of loyalist restoration: Wen Tianxiang (文天祥), Ban Chao (班超), Yue Fei (岳飛), and Koxinga (鄭成功). What they were granted was gravel riverbed, cleared stone by stone; land reform turned tenants into owners, but most plots have since been sold, and decades of licensed and illicit sand extraction have depleted the productivity of the surrounding land. The men were almost all Yunnanese and their wives largely from the highland minorities of the Burma, Thailand, and Laos borderlands, particularly Dai and Hani, and the Yunnan-Burmese cooking that came with them has lately drawn visitors from outside. A small museum in Xinguo, founded by Liang Hongcai (梁宏才), who arrived at eleven with his father’s unit, holds photographs and belongings carried out of the frontier.