Turning artillery shells into knives

The old shells in Maestro Wu's workshop have become a draw for tourists

Kinmen: In a contemporary twist on beating swords into ploughshares, Taiwanese blacksmith Wu Tseng-dong has forged a career fashioning kitchen knives from Chinese artillery shells once fired at his home. Known locally as “Maestro Wu”, his workshop on the island of Kinmen — which lies just two miles from the Chinese mainland — is a vivid reminder of the threat of war continually hanging over Taiwan.

Like many of the older generations living on Kinmen, Wu grew up under bombardment.Even after China’s civil war ended in 1949, leaving Mao Zedong’s Communists in charge of the mainland and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in Taiwan, the island continued to be shelled by communist forces. The shells were still falling as late as the 1970s.

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“I remember the fear we felt at night,” he told AFP. “Shelling may look exciting in the movies the more intense it gets, but in reality it’s very dangerous.””We tried to pick as many shells as we could, even climbing the trees to get them, in order to exchange them for little prizes. It was fun for our childhood even though we feared the air raids,” he added.

A third-generation blacksmith, Wu learnt how to mould metal as a young boy.Most of Wu’s knives are made from the cases of the propaganda shells, which are better preserved as they did not explode on impact. In the last three decades he estimates he has bashed out around 400,000 such knives.

The old shells are stacked high in Wu’s workshop, which has become something of a draw for tourists. Visitors excitedly snap pictures as Wu methodically sculpts a glowing hunk of metal into a cleaver.In recent years– Kinmen had become a popular destination for mainland Chinese tourists.