Republican Chinese Diaspora in Taiwan

This theme documents physical traces of the Republican Chinese diaspora in Taiwan (民國播遷): the community of mainland-born soldiers, officials, intellectuals, and their dependents who crossed the Taiwan Strait with the retreat of the Kuomintang government in 1949. Over a million people arrived in the closing months of the Chinese Civil War, and in many cases their subsequent lives on the island remained oriented toward the mainland they had left behind.

The scope here is deliberately narrower than the broader post-war era: retirement villas and tombs of former KMT generals, Chinese martyrs’ shrines honoring Republican-era military dead, calligraphy and inscriptions by mainland-born literati, and other sites that engage less with Taiwan as a lived place than with the mainland world their occupants had left behind. Many of these places document lives that began in Republican-era China and simply happened to end in Taiwan.