Noble Ghosts, Empty Graves, and Suppressed Traumas The Heroic Tale of “Taiyuan’s Five Hundred Martyrs” in the Chinese Civil War Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang Assistant Professor, Department of History, University Missouri-Columbia Abstract • On 19 February 1951, a state-sponsored funeral took place in north Taipei in which a splendid cenotaph to commemorate the “five hundred martyrs of Taiyuan”— heroic individuals who died defending a distant city in northern China against the Chinese Communist encirclement—was revealed. In the four decades that followed, the National- ist government on Taiwan built a commemorative cult and a pedagogic enterprise cen- tering on these figures. Yet, the martyrs’ epic was a complete fiction, one used by Chiang Kai-shek’s regime to erase the history of atrocities and mass displacement in the Chinese civil war. Following Taiwan’s democratization in the 1990s, the repressed traumas returned in popular narratives; this recovery tore the hidden wounds wide open. By examining the tale of the five hundred martyrs as both history and metaphor, this article illustrates the importance of political forces in both suppressing and shaping traumatic memories in Taiwan. Keywords • Chiang Kai-shek, Chinese civil war, collective memory, martyrdom, Shanxi, Taiwan, Taiyuan, trauma Introduction On the morning of 19 February 1951, a state-sponsored memorial service took place in Yuanshan, a picturesque knoll shrouded in lush greenery over- looking Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan, from the north. The recently ex- iled Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) leaders from mainland China held the service to commemorate the “five hundred martyrs of Taiyuan”—heroic individuals who died defending the provincial capital of Shanxi Province in northern China against the Chinese Communist encirclement in late April, 1949. 1 With the shocking defeat still weighing heavily on their minds, the mood of this carefully planned state funeral was as cold and thick as the Historical Reflections Volume 41, Issue 3, Winter 2015 © Berghahn Journals doi: 10.3167/hrrh.2015.410308 ISSN 0315-7997 (Print), ISSN 1939-2419 (Online) ••• ••• •••