The Chiangs, Father and Son, Can't Rest in Peace Just Yet

DASI, Taiwan - The two black marble sarcophagi sit in similar mausoleums less than a mile apart, each a one-story building of house size arranged around a tiny, grassy courtyard in a wooded valley an hour's drive southwest of Taipei.

Inside are the bodies of the men who ran Taiwan under martial law for four decades: Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo. When Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, it was widely assumed that he had wanted to be buried someday on the mainland, although he is not known to have left any explicit instructions. His body was embalmed and placed in what is officially still a temporary mausoleum here, and the same was done with his son.

If the Chiang family has its way, as now seems likely, both former presidents of Taiwan will finally be buried next spring. But the family's decision has awakened old ghosts of a sort: the anger and resentment of the relatives of tens of thousands of people who were tortured or killed or both under martial law, in the name of eradicating Communist sympathizers.

Gregory Chiang, a grandson of Chiang Kai-shek and nephew of Chiang Ching-kuo, said that members of the now-scattered family gathered in New York last autumn for the funeral of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and began talking then about the possibility of burials. The family sent a secret letter to Taiwan's Defense Ministry early this year, asking that both men be buried at Taiwan's national military cemetery on the outskirts of Taipei.

The Defense Ministry agreed this summer, making the family's request public for the first time.

In the first interview a family member has granted since the decision, Mr. Chiang said the family wanted the presidents to be with their troops. The family also wanted to spare the government the expense of maintaining the mausoleums, he added.

Madame Chiang Kai-shek's body is in a temporary repository in Hartsdale, N.Y. Family members said last year that it was her wish to be buried someday in mainland China after its reunification with Taiwan.

Mr. Chiang said she had never spoken to him of what should be done with her body or the presidents' embalmed corpses. "When I visited her, I had cookies, we talked about the children; this wasn't something I talked to my grandmother about," he said.

Nor, apparently, did his family consult the people who suffered at his relatives' hands.

One of the most outspoken of those is J.C. Hung, a television producer specializing in documentaries about martial law victims. Mr. Hung said that he had been born in jail because his parents happened to attend a book club that read books about psychology, a club that a suspected Communist had joined. Mr. Hung's mother and father were arrested, imprisoned for many years and, he said, severely tortured through the first two years of their incarceration.

Mr. Hung said he welcomed the Chiang family's decision to have the two men buried, but opposed any ceremony for the event. Chiang Kai-shek's death in particular was accompanied by nearly a month of national mourning, in which television stations switched from color to black-and-white broadcasts and newspapers refrained from using red ink, a color that symbolizes joy.

If a funeral procession is organized next spring through the heart of Taipei, one of the ideas under discussion, Mr. Hung said, he and other critics of martial law will try to desecrate the former presidents' sarcophagi.

"We have a chance to throw paint or throw axes," he said, contending that it would be impossible along a long procession route to match the current security at the mausoleums.

John Chang, who was recognized by the Taiwanese government in December, 2002, as an illegitimate son of Chiang Ching-kuo, said he doubted there would be any incidents during a procession. He contended that security would probably be tighter then than in the mausoleums, where only a single attendant stands inside each and where only single strands of velvet rope hold back visitors from the sarcophagi.

Both former rulers still have their admirers. A small group in southern Taiwan has even erected a little temple for the worship of Chiang Kai-shek, whom they revere as divine. More people look back on martial law nostalgically as a calm and prosperous period -- before competition from mainland China gutted much of the island's manufacturing base -- and gloss over the abductions and assassinations of political opponents.

On a recent summer day, David Liang, a 32-year-old from central Taiwan whose father grew up on the mainland and his mother in Taiwan, showed his toddler how to bow silently and respectfully before the sarcophagus of Chiang Ching-kuo. Outside the mausoleum afterward, he spoke fondly of the days of dictatorship.

"After the government lifted martial law," he said, "the political situation in Taiwan became a mess."

If nothing else, the burials could end a curse that, according to traditional local beliefs, will hang over the men's male descendants as long as the corpses remain above ground. All three of Chiang Ching-kuo's legitimate sons and one of his two illegitimate sons died in middle age of cancer and various other natural causes after their father died in 1988.

"Sometimes you feel like it's coincidence, but to some degree it is about fortune," said Lynn Huang, 32, a tourist from southern Taiwan who paused outside Chiang Kai-shek's mausoleum. "The dead will get rest when buried underground."