Chiang Kai-shek’s former homes are open to tourists

NESTLED in a wood outside the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing is a mansion used as an official residence in the 1930s and 1940s by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese leader who fled to Taiwan to escape Mao Zedong’s Communist army. After the civil war, Chiang’s name became synonymous with evil in China. No longer. The building (pictured) in what was then China’s capital has become a tourist hotspot. There is no hint that this was the home of Mao’s mortal enemy.

Over the past two decades the Gissimo—as his American allies once irreverently called the dictator, who died in 1975—has morphed in the minds of Communist officials from arch-villain to patriot. His glamorous wife, Soong Mei-ling (“Missimo”), has become something of an idol. The Communist Party is signalling that, for all its misgivings about Chiang, at least he resolutely believed that Taiwan was an integral part of China, even if not of a Communist-ruled one. It wants Taiwan’s current government, which bridles at such a notion, to take note (see Banyan).