Military History | 明德公園 — Where the First Salvo Landed

The 金門防衛司令部 was setting out dinner on the evening of 23 August 1958. The guest was 俞大維, the Republic of China's Minister of National Defence, on a visit to the island; the table was at 翠谷水上餐廳, a pavilion built over a pond in a valley tucked behind 太武山. Then the guns on the Fujian coast opened up, and the valley turned out to be one of the aiming points.

八二三砲戰 (金門炮戰; in English, the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis) begins here, and accounts of the first minutes do not agree. PLA sources put the opening order at 17:30 and record 31,757 rounds in the initial bombardment. ROC sources, including the stone tablet standing in this park, give 18:30 and put the day's total above 57,000. Both describe fire concentrated on command posts, observation positions and gun emplacements rather than spread across the island.

Two of the garrison's three deputy commanders, 趙家驤 and 章傑, were killed in the valley. The third, 吉星文, died of his wounds within days; the published record splits between one day and three, and between blood loss and peritonitis. 胡璉, who commanded on Kinmen, his chief of staff 劉明奎, and 俞大維 were all wounded and survived. A story that an informer betrayed the dinner has circulated ever since, and no documentary record supports it.

Staff stopped using the valley's name afterwards. 翠谷 sounded too close to 碎骨, shattered bone, and the place became 太谷 instead, a substitution you can trace through the island's landscape poetry, from 趙家驤's own 翠谷蓮塘 to 范叔寒's later 太谷凝香.

It is 明德公園 now. A pavilion shelters the memorial that 金門防衛司令部 raised to the three officers on 23 August 1987, and a second tablet carries the park's dedication in the vocabulary the ROC military used in the 1980s, 匪 and 光復神州 included. The pond it was all arranged around is still there.

📸 Cover: 胡璉將軍紀念館, the preserved commander's residence about 150 m from the park in the same 金防部 complex below 太武山 — a nearby view, not the memorial itself. Photo by Ying-lung LU, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.