The British Prisoner of War Camp is located above Guashan Elementary School, and can also be accessed from Quanji Hall.
When walking along Qitang Old Street and going down the mountain, a beautiful semicolon is Guashan Elementary School. Guashan Elementary School is very eye-catching because you can see the beautiful Keelung Mountain!
Guashan Elementary School has been running for more than 100 years. Since the opening of the mine, the population of Jinguashi has gradually increased. At its peak, there were more than 3,000 people. In early 1918 (the seventh year of Taisho), the Jinguashi branch of Ruifang Public School was established. , opened a new page in mining education, and established itself as Jinguashi Public School in 1922 (Taisho 11th year) and has laid the foundation for Jinguashi mine basic education ever since.
Nowadays, the campus has a classical sundial, an ecological pool, and a campus renovation monument. The best thing is that the playground faces the beautiful Keelung Mountain scenery, which has become the beautiful feature of Guashan Elementary School. If you have the opportunity, drop by and visit!< /p>
The story of Wenzhou migrant workers
During the Japanese occupation, the population statistics showed that there were 30,000 local people in Ruifangzhuang, about 1,000 Japanese, followed by about 700 or 800 people from Wenzhou and Fuzhou, most of whom were concentrated in the Jinjiu area. Due to the mining process of Jinguashi, The locals were unwilling to do unskilled jobs, so they recruited more Wenzhou people, mostly single young people, and disembarked from Keelung Port. Most of them lived in simple workhouses next to Quanji Hall, called Wenzhouhouses.
Compared with the houses on Qitang Road, there are only long rows of houses connected to each other. Most single Wenzhou people live together in small houses, and they can barely lie down and rest in the small space.
Later, the Sino-Japanese War broke out, and exchanges between Taiwan and mainland China were interrupted. With national defense as the top priority, the local mining equipment was dismantled and used for other purposes. The prosperity was gone. Many Wenzhou people also left, leaving only Wenzhou Lao.
History After the September 18th Incident, Sino-Japanese relations took a turn for the worse. Chinese recruitment was not going well. Some local Wenzhou residents in Jinguashi went to heaven and some left. The Wenzhou Lao gradually became empty. Later, the Wenzhou Lao was converted into a prisoner of war camp. .
During World War II, the Japanese army was overwhelming in Southeast Asia, brutally killing people across China and Southeast Asia. After the British army was defeated and signed to surrender in Singapore, foreigners were sent to the mines. There are Britain, the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, Singapore, Malaysia, etc.
There were dozens of prisoner-of-war camps from south to north in Taipei, and Jinguashi was the largest in Taiwan at the time.
Prisoners of war faced the fate of being massacred. They were taken to six pits to work every day. They were mostly engaged in earth-moving, pushing carts, and mining. The heat and humidity were heavy, and the temperature reached above 50 degrees or above. Many people fell ill, and two of them fell ill. doctors but with little available medical equipment, the mortality rate was high.
At the end of the war, the U.S. military in the Pacific Theater launched the “leapfrog tactic” to regain the islands occupied by the Japanese one by one.
Some generals advocate skipping the Philippines and attacking Taiwan directly; strategically speaking, it is better to capture the Philippines than to capture Taiwan. However, General MacArthur advocated retaking the Philippines because he had been defeated by the Japanese army and fled the Philippines in a hurry. When leaving, he promised a classic saying: “I will definitely come back!”
MacArthur’s heroic promise saved Taiwan from disaster.
If the US military attacks Taiwan, it will not only suffer the hundreds of prisoners of war in Jinguashi, but it will also affect a large number of Taiwanese soldiers and civilians.
The Pacific War came to an end only when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan; orders affecting the lives of all prisoners of war were not carried out, and tens of millions of lives in the Jinguashi Prisoner of War Camp were spared from massacre.
The current prisoner-of-war camp is the former site of Wenzhou Lao. Today, only the entrance gatepost, a small wall, open space and the newly built prisoner-of-war monument remain.
In 1997, the Taiwan Prisoner of War Camp Memorial Association returned to the current site to erect a monument and hold a memorial service every November. The construction of Shuijinjiu Park is now planned as the “International End of War Peace Memorial Park”.
Walking through the historical corridors, cherishing peace and praying for world peace!
There is a bus that stops at Guashan Elementary School, and you can walk through the Jinshui Highway to the Peace Memorial Park and reach Qitang Old Street! Go up past Qitang Old Street and take the bus back to Quanji Hall.
Everyone can also share the beauty of walking on Qitang Old Street!
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