In the 823 Artillery Bombardment (
What this has given Kinmen, in addition to many semi-collapsed buildings, is a huge cache of high-quality steel. In the hands of knife-maker Wu Tseng-dong (
PHOTOS: IAN BARTHOLOMEW, TAIPEI TIMES
The Chin Ho Li Steel Knife Factory (
Wu Tsong-shan, a quietly spoken bespectacled man, has spent over 30 years making knives and is the third generation of his family in the business. Wu recalled a childhood in which he would work the bellows of the forge when he got back from school, and serve as an assistant to his father and brothers around the smithy.
"In those days, production was very limited," he said. "But the knives we made were highly regarded, and would often be bought by soldiers stationed on the island and taken back to Taiwan. That's how our reputation grew."
In the early days, Wu's family made agricultural implements. Bombing of the island provided quality steel that literally dropped from the sky, and the Wu family shifted to making knives.
"Mostly we made butcher's knives. In the beginning, we would only take money after a person had used the knife and found it satisfactory. If it was unsatisfactory, we would replace it with another."
This input by Kinmen's butchers has been put to good use and now Wu's knives are definitely at the top end of the market. Sadly, perhaps, they are no longer used by local butchers, but have instead found their way into the kitchens of chefs working for major hotels in Taiwan and overseas. "Some have even provided specific designs for us," Wu said, "and we are gaining experience of their habits and needs."
While Wu does not claim any analytical knowledge of the materials he uses, his long familiarity with his materials has made him an expert in the subtle art of forging steel. "We must judge the heat of the steel very accurately. The color [of the red hot] steel tells us what we need to know ... this is part of the secret knowledge of our business," he said, with a mixture of pride and self-deprecation. "It all has to be judged very accurately."
Certainly, part of the appeal of Kinmen knives is in their association with history, but they would certainly not be so popular if they were not also of outstanding quality. The secret is in the fact that these knives are still forged and shaped by hand. "There is no comparison with mass-produced knives that are simply cut and ground from a metal board," he said. "It is the forging process that gives these knives their hardness and their ability to hold an edge."
The government has played a part in raising the profile of Kinmen knives. Since 1998 it has provided guidance about designing Western style knives and in 2000 assisted with a total revamp of labeling and packaging.
These days, "Maestro Wu" knives come in elegant display boxes and Wu says that they are increasingly developing extra-high-end knives for collectors.
"After all, one kitchen only needs a few knives, and our knives last a long time, so we have to expand the market in new directions."
July 1 to July 7 Huang Ching-an (黃慶安) couldn’t help but notice Imelita Masongsong during a company party in the Philippines. With paler skin and more East Asian features, she did not look like the other locals. On top of his job duties, Huang had another mission in the country, given by his mother: to track down his cousin, who was deployed to the Philippines by the Japanese during World War II and never returned. Although it had been more than three decades, the family was still hoping to find him. Perhaps Imelita could provide some clues. Huang never found the cousin;
Once again, we are listening to the government talk about bringing in foreign workers to help local manufacturing. Speaking at an investment summit in Washington DC, the Minister of Economic Affairs, J.W. Kuo (郭智輝), said that the nation must attract about 400,000 to 500,000 skilled foreign workers for high end manufacturing by 2040 to offset the falling population. That’s roughly 15 years from now. Using the lower number, Taiwan would have to import over 25,000 foreigners a year for these positions to reach that goal. The government has no idea what this sounds like to outsiders and to foreigners already living here.
Lines on a map once meant little to India’s Tibetan herders of the high Himalayas, expertly guiding their goats through even the harshest winters to pastures on age-old seasonal routes. That stopped in 2020, after troops from nuclear-armed rivals India and China clashed in bitter hand-to-hand combat in the contested high-altitude border lands of Ladakh. Swaths of grazing lands became demilitarized “buffer zones” to keep rival forces apart. For 57-year-old herder Morup Namgyal, like thousands of other semi-nomadic goat and yak herders from the Changpa pastoralist people, it meant traditional lands were closed off. “The Indian army stops us from going there,” Namgyal said,
In spite of the next local elections being over two years away, there is already considerable intrigue and jockeying for position by politicians and their supporters. The local press runs quite a bit of content, mostly speculative, on who will run in what races and what the outcomes might be. This is an overview for English language readers to get a taste of the state of play. Four races in particular are drawing a lot of heat, those of mayors of New Taipei City, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung because in all four the incumbent mayors will be term-limited out. In