TAIPEI (AFP) — Thousands of tourists flocked to the mausoleums of Taiwan's former Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his son on Saturday as they reopened under the newly installed Kuomintang government.
TV pictures showed an unnamed Kuomintang military veteran weeping at the Chiang Kai-shek mausoleums, in the northern county of Taoyuan, which were closed under the former pro-independence government.
"I followed him to Taiwan from (China's) Zhoushan islands more than 50 years ago," the veteran told reporters.
The first 1,000 tourists at the mausoleums were given a commemorative badge and were snapped up in the first hour of opening, a Taoyuan official told AFP.
The former government of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) shut down the mausoleums of Chiang and his son Chiang Ching-kuo in December to downplay the legacy of the two former Kuomintang leaders.
The Kuomintang's Ma Ying-jeou was sworn in on May 20 after winning elections in March.
Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan and set up a rival government in Taipei in 1949 after his Kuomintang troops were defeated by Mao Zedong's communist forces on the Chinese mainland. He died in 1975.
Chiang Ching-kuo was president from 1978 until his death in 1988. The Kuomintang ruled Taiwan for 51 years until 2000, when it lost power to the DPP. Before their December 24 closure, the Chiang mausoleums were a major tourist attraction, luring 1.7 million visitors and earning 800 million Taiwan dollars (26.32 million US) a year for the county.
The Kuomintang, then in opposition, strongly protested the shutdown, calling it politically motivated, although the then government said budgetary and manpower shortages were the reason.
Chiang Kai-shek is remembered by some as the leader who laid the foundation of Taiwan's economic prosperity and safeguarded the island from Chinese invasion.
However, the DPP holds him responsible for a massacre on February 28, 1947, in which thousands of local people were killed by Kuomintang troops during riots.
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