A Quiet Mission to Return Lost Souls Home
Table of Contents
For decades, one man has been quietly reuniting the remains of soldiers who fled China’s civil war with their ancestral villages, a deeply personal journey complicated by geopolitical tensions.
- Liu De-wen, a 58-year-old Taiwanese man, has helped return the ashes of hundreds of waishengren—those who followed the Kuomintang to Taiwan—to their families in China over the past 23 years.
- The work navigates complex issues of identity, grief, and the historical relationship between Taiwan and mainland China.
- While celebrated by some as a compassionate act, Liu’s efforts are also viewed through the lens of Beijing’s political agenda to promote unification.
- Lin Ru Min, a former soldier who died in Taiwan at age 103, is among those Liu is helping to return to their ancestral homes.
In the leafy back blocks of a military cemetery in northern Taiwan, Liu De-wen strides through a room holding rows and rows of shelves. He stops and stoops to the lowest row, opening a small, ornate gold door. He pulls out an urn, bundles it into his lap, and hugs it. This is how Liu begins his solemn task: returning the remains of those displaced by history to the families and homeland they longed for.
“Grandpa Lin, follow me closely,” Liu says. “I am bringing you back home to Fujian as you wished. Stay close.”
Inside the jade green urn are the ashes of Lin Ru Min, a former soldier who was 103 when he died in Taiwan, far from his home village in China’s Fujian province. Lin is among hundreds of people whose remains Liu has helped return to China over the past 23 years.
What began as a personal mission to help veterans reconnect with their roots has evolved into a poignant, and sometimes politically charged, undertaking. Liu’s work operates in a complicated space at the heart of modern Taiwan’s history, navigating the nuances of family grief and separation, the complicated ties between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, and the risks of it all being co-opted in Beijing’s demands for reunification.
A History of Displacement
At the end of China’s civil war between the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communists in the late 1940s, Lin was a young fisher with a wife and five children in coastal Fujian, when he was forcibly taken by the retreating KMT troops. His niece’s daughter, Chen Rong, recalls the disruption to their family life.
He was forced into conscription and brought to Taiwan, denied the chance to return home for nearly half a century. The KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek, transported an estimated one to two million people—known as waishengren in Taiwan—including soldiers, government workers, their families, and conscripts like Lin.
“Tens of thousands were literally kidnapped to Taiwan this way,” says Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, a historian of modern Taiwan, China, and civil war exiles at the University of Missouri. “In some coastal communities along the retreat paths of the Nationalist divisions, a large number of men were taken away.”
Chiang Kai-shek planned to regroup and retake mainland China, but that never happened. For almost 40 years, he ruled Taiwan under martial law, banning travel and exchanges with the Communist-ruled People’s Republic of China.
A Longing for Home
By the late 1980s, when travel bans were lifted and China had undergone three decades of Maoism, returning home was no longer realistic for most of the remaining veterans, including Lin. Only about 2% ever did.
“The homes that the KMT soldiers left behind in the late 1940s had dramatically changed by then,” says Prof. James Lin, an expert in Taiwan’s history and international studies at the University of Washington. “Most soldiers had settled down in Taiwan with families, and despite their longing for their original homes in China, their lives were now here.”
Before he died, Lin told Chen that he still wished to be buried in Fujian. That’s when Chen found Liu, an energetic man from Kaohsiung who has dedicated himself to helping families return the ashes of waishengren to their ancestral homes.
Liu began this work in his 30s, after moving into a village built for KMT soldiers and becoming the local borough chief.
“There were over 2,000 single veterans in my community who had no wives or families in Taiwan,” Liu recalls. “They missed their parents deeply. Every Chinese New Year, they would face their hometown and sit for hours, quietly longing for home… they asked me to help them fulfill their wish to honor their parents.”
Liu’s work has taken him across Taiwan, sometimes searching through overgrown areas to locate long-neglected graves. “Some were merchants or sailors who came to Taiwan for business and never returned,” says Lin. “Regardless of their background, I help families if I can find their relatives.”
A Complex Undertaking
Liu carries the urns, often in a backpack worn on his chest as a sign of respect. He documents his journeys on social media, showing the urns in vehicles and hotels, providing updates to the families. He doesn’t charge for his services and is wary of those who do. He receives no financial support from the Taiwanese or Chinese governments, and is reluctant to discuss his funding sources. Taiwan’s veterans affairs council declined to comment.
Liu’s work has been covered in Taiwanese media and extensively in Chinese state media, where he is lauded as a “ferryman of the souls.” “Many in China sympathize with the old soldiers who were cut off from their villages,” says Prof. Lin. However, the narrative is also used by Beijing to emphasize familial ties between China and Taiwan, promoting unification—a prospect opposed by a majority of Taiwanese people.
More than 60% of people in Taiwan identify solely as Taiwanese, while about one in three consider themselves both Taiwanese and Chinese. Those who identify as Chinese and support unification are often among the older waishengren.
“It benefits Beijing to highlight the close ties between people across the strait, reinforcing the idea that both sides are one family,” says Prof. Lin. Many of these men, like Lin, had little control over the events that changed their lives, and their experiences are often overlooked in modern Taiwan due to their association with the former KMT regime.
Liu says people in China and Taiwan are kin who “share the same origins and the same heritage,” but beyond that, he says he simply wants peace. He doesn’t concern himself with how his work is perceived.
“What I care deeply about is building this kind of bridge for veterans to go home.”
After collecting Lin’s urn, Liu offers more blessings. He films a video for Lin’s family in Fujian, then wraps the urn in red and gold cloth and places it inside a backpack, ready for the journey to Fujian.
Chen cries.
“We are going home,” she says. “I am asking Mr. Liu to bring you home. Please bless us with health and safety.”
Additional reporting by Jason Tzu Kuan Lu
