Military History | 翟山坑道 — After 1958 the Island Went Underground

The lesson the garrison took from 1958 was that anything above ground could be hit. Kinmen is granite and granite gneiss, hard to cut and excellent to hide in, and through the years that followed the island's command posts, stores and boat berths went into the rock. 翟山坑道, near 古崗 on the south-west coast, is the most complete of them open to the public.

It is a waterway rather than a corridor: an A-shaped channel roughly 357 metres long, driven through to the sea and sized for landing craft to enter, turn and tie up, with berthing reported for 42 small boats. Engineers cut it by hand, working three shifts around the clock. Sources differ on when they began — the 交通部觀光署 says 1961, while 金門國家公園, which runs the site, says 1963 — and agree the work finished in 1966. The purpose follows straight from 料羅灣: the last leg of resupply was small craft on an exposed beach, and this put that leg under a mountain.

Silt and changing requirements made it redundant. The tunnel was abandoned in the mid-1980s and reopened as a visitor site in July 1998 under 金門國家公園.

Hard hats are handed out at the entrance. The chamber has hosted an annual tunnel music festival since 2009, the granite serving as a sounding box; on an ordinary morning the only sound is water shifting against rock, and the only light comes off the sea end and climbs the walls.

📸 Cover: the waterway inside 翟山坑道, looking toward the sea entrance. Photo by YuTK, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.