Military History | 馬山播音站 — Twenty Years of Odd-Numbered Days

The shelling did not end in 1958. It turned into a timetable. On 25 October 1958 the PRC Ministry of National Defence issued 《再告臺灣同胞書》, announcing that 金門 would be shelled on odd-numbered days and left alone on even ones. 單打雙不打, odd days fire and even days do not, ran for the next twenty years.

What the rounds carried changed as well. From December 1958 many were 砲宣彈, hollow shells packed with leaflets that split open in the air, and the traffic went both ways: ROC batteries fired their own leaflet rounds back on the same calendar. 馬山, on Kinmen's north-east corner, is the closest point on the island to the mainland, with 角嶼 about 2,100 metres off and roughly 1,800 at low tide. That is where the other medium was installed. A bank of loudspeakers, 48 of them by the station's own account, carried voices across the water, and loudspeakers on the far shore answered.

It stopped on 1 January 1979, the day the PRC and the United States established diplomatic relations, when Defence Minister 徐向前 announced the halt. A little over twenty years had passed since the first salvo.

金門國家公園 opened the broadcasting booth to visitors in January 2017. The desk is still in place with its microphone, an amplifier and a cassette deck, and the wall racks still hold the tapes. Over the entrance the park restored a period couplet in 2016 reading 「瓦解匪軍士氣．宏揚大漢天聲」, language of its own decade, kept as the artifact it is. Photography is not allowed inside the tunnel.

📸 Cover: the broadcast booth inside 馬山播音站, with the tape racks. Photo by 人人生來平等, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.