Chiang Kai-shek lives in memory as an immortal of Chinese history. He will live again in enduring bronze and marble in an impressive monument taking shape in the middle of Taipei, where he spent his final years standing firm as the leader of his people, for the principles of freedom and democracy to which he dedicated his life, and against aggression.
Many people from many walks of life, from the humble to the great, have roles in the building of the Chung Cheng Memorial (Chung Cheng was President Chiang Kai-shek's familiar name). Two among them might be cal1ed outstanding -C. C. Yang, one of the leading architects of the Republic of China, and Chen I-fan, one of the country's foremost sculptors. Yang is the designer and supervisor of building for the memorial park and its structures. Chen is creating the massive bronze figure that will portray the President as he was in his later years but still in the fullness of life.
The memorial will commemorate President Chiang's career as soldier, statesman and stalwart standard-bearer in the battle for human rights. It also will contribute to the perpetuation and spread of Chinese culture - especial1y in the fields of music and dramatic arts, which President Chiang loved and encouraged.
The Chung Cheng Memorial Park will occupy about 250,000 square meters of land south and east of the main business section and civic center of Taipei. For those familiar with the provisional capital of the Republic of China, it fronts on Chungshan South Road. Hangchou South Road is to the east. Hsinyi Road forms the northern boundary and Aikuo East Road the southern limit. Total cost is estimated at NT$876 million (US$23 million).
The site once was that of a barracks. Thousands of cubic meters of dirt, rock and other rubble had been dumped on the grounds at the time of this writing and the general appearance was that of a military establishment leveled in a furious, long-lasting battle of aerial and artillery bombardment. The rubble will be used in leveling the site as the work progresses. Out of the ugliness will come a creation of rare beauty.
Included will be a Memorial Hall with the statue of the late President as the chief feature. There will be a concert hall seating 2,500 and a Chinese opera house to accommodate 1,200. The rest of the site will be developed into a park with the trees, shrubs, flowers, streams, ponds and shaded walks that President Chiang loved.
The design of the Chung Cheng Memorial Park submitted by C. C. Yang was chosen by a construction committee of 16 top government officials and civic leaders as the best expression of the life and career of President Chiang. Forty-three designs were submitted to the committee from Chinese architects at home and abroad. The final choice also had the approval of two American authorities on architecture, Professors Pietro Beluschi and Eduardo Catalano, both of the School of Architecture and Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The chairman of the Memorial Construction Committee, Governor K. H. Yu of the Central Bank of China, reported that the committee has received millions of NT dollars in contributions from organizations and people of all walks of life. Many companies are donating building materials - cement, steel bars, glass and so on.
A lot of building materials will be required. The main Memorial Building, a structure of gleaming white Taiwan marble over reinforced concrete, will be square and 40 by 40 meters in size with a 70-meter base (as high as a 25-story building).
The air-conditioned concert hall will have an area of 17,000 square meters and a layout similar to that of the Philharmonic Music Hall in Berlin, recognized as one of the best structures of its kind in the world from the standpoint of design and acoustics.
The opera house will occupy an area of 19,000 square meters. It also will accommodate folk dancing and other performances.
The bronze statue of President Chiang seated in an armchair somewhat in the style of the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C., will stand 6.3 meters high on a granite base of 3.5 meters. That means a total height of 9.8 meters, or nearly 30 feet. Inscriptions and bas-relief scenes on the "plinth" or sub-base of the statue will depict important events in the life of the President.
In the basement of the Memorial Hall, an exhibition room will display memorabilia of President Chiang. A 100-seat theater will show films telling his life story.
Beneath the park as a concession to the rapid modernization of the Republic of China will be a garage to provide parking space for 628 automobiles and 400 motorcycles. Construction of two entrances to the garage is already under way.
Architect C.C. Yang shows writer (left) a model. (File photo)
Architect C. C. Yang, 63, was born and brought up in Hopei province on the China mainland at Tangshan, a city which suffered heavy damage in the earthquake of 1976. His father was a mining engineer at the Kailuan coal mine.
Yang wanted to become an architect from his early childhood. After high school he studied at National Sun Yat-sen University of Canton - at that time located temporarily at Kunming in Yunnan province because of the Japanese occupation of the Canton area. He was graduated in 1940.
Yang came to Taipei in 1946, the year following retrocession of Taiwan to the Republic of China after 50 years of Japanese occupation. He founded his own architectural and engineering firm - C. C. Yang and Associates - in 1953.
The Retser Engineering Agency, largest unit of the Vocational Assistance Commission for Retired Servicemen and also the biggest construction company in the Republic of China, is building the Chung Cheng Memorial. The groundbreaking ceremonies were held April 5, 1977, the second anniversary of the death of the President. The work done at the time I visited the site included the sinking of piles 43 meters deep to support the weight of the massive structure of the Memorial Hall.
Architect Yang has qualified as one of the best known and mostly highly regarded men in his profession by designing and supervising construction of a number of major structures contributing to the skyline of Taipei. Among them are the famous Grand Hotel overlooking the city from a hill above the Keelung River and a striking sight for travelers approaching the Taipei International Airport. Yang was the designer of the original Grand, built in the 1950s and 60s, and the massive second section built in front of it and completed in 1972.
The Taipei Grand Hotel with its yellow tile roof and striking red pillars is the largest such Chinese-style building in the world. With its elaborately decorated and luxuriously finished interior, the Taipei Grand has been rated by travel writers as one of the 10 finest hotels in the world.
Yang was the architect for Chiang Kai-shek's official residence in the Taipei suburb of Shihlin and also for his temporary resting place in a rural lakeside setting at Tzuhu west of Taipei.
Yang said of his biggest assignment:
"The Memorial Hall must be imbued with a sense of Chinese nobility, historical importance and continuity."
Yang and his associates spent three months and about NT$2 million completing the first blueprints of the Memorial. He and three associates went abroad to consult with foreign specialists on the design, to study noteworthy memorials in European capitals and elsewhere, and to consult hundreds of volumes of reference materials.
Yang said completion of the Memorial Hall, the statue of President Chiang and the landscaped grounds is slated for 1980. The concert hall and the Chinese opera house will be completed in 1982.
The front entrance of the Memorial Hall will look out on the red brick tower of the Presidential Building several blocks away. Yang said the government has decreed that no new buildings more than 10 stories high may be built within 50 meters of the park. The space between buildings in the area must be sizable.
"The purpose," he said, "is to present a clear view of the memorial from all directions."
While Architect C. C. Yang and his associates are concerned with the building, Chen I-fan - 48 years old and a professional sculptor for 25 years - is working on the statue of Chiang Kai-shek for the rotunda of the Memorial Hall.
Chen, a slender man who looks younger than his age, is a native of Fukien province across the Taiwan Straits and a graduate of the art department of Fukien University. He is the son of a small town merchant. There were no other artists in the family, but art was his obsession from the time he was a small boy - particularly the creation of figures modeled from clay. He came to Taiwan shortly after return of the province to the Republic of China in 1945.
Sculptor Chen I-fan at work on clay figure of President Chiang Kai-shek at his outdoor studio. (File photo)
Chen I-fan attained distinction at 30 when he won a competition with his design for a statue of Yu Yu-jen, a much revered political leader of the earlier years of the Republic of China. The statue, a 16-foot bronze figure on a marble pedestal, stands surrounded by shrubbery in a traffic circle at a main intersection in Taipei.
Chen later did a bronze statue of Wu Chin-hung, an associate of Dr. Sun Yat-sen in the founding of the Republic. Also 16 feet tall, it stands in a Taipei park.
Chen's design for the statue of the Founding Father of the Republic, which stands in the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei, was chosen from the submissions of 16 finalists. Chen had done an earlier, much-praised figure of Dr. Sun as a young man, standing and reading the manifesto of the revolutionary movement he founded while living in Hawaii. The statue stands in the Chinatown section of Honolulu.
The statue of Dr. Sun, like the one of President Chiang now taking shape, is a seated figure 19 feet tall on a marble base. It was unveiled in 1972.
A smaller version of the same figure is to be seen at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall on the campus of St. John's University at Jamaica, New York.
Chen I-fan had made 10 statues of Chiang Kai-shek in various poses, nine of which have been widely copied, before he was chosen to do the dominant figure for the Memorial Park.
Chen strives to show the inner character of his subjects in his portraits of clay and bronze. For this reason, he prefers to portray older people.
Chen is working on the figure of Chiang Kai-shek at his outdoor studio, shaded by an awning, outside his home in the Taipei suburb of Hsintien. About two years' work on the commission remain, then the statue will be cast in bronze by sections, assembled and installed in the completed Memorial Building.
The head of the late President, taking shape in clay on a wooden turntable that moves easily on ball bearings, is nearly six feet high. Chen works from a ladder and has had one painful fall. Fortunately, he was not seriously injured. Like other artists, he sometimes becomes so engrossed in his work that he forgets to eat and might skip many meals if Mrs. Chen were not there to remind him. They have two small children.
At times, Mrs. Chen told me, her husband rises at daylight to go out and work into the portrait-in-clay some touch that occurred to him when he awoke in the night. It was on one such early morning venture that he suffered the fall.
Chen's portrait of Chiang Kai-shek is intended to show the late President at about the age of 70, when he was still in vigorous good health, a man of noble character seasoned by past trials and looking forward with confidence to the eventual triumph of right over despotism. The artist is taking exceptional care in depicting the eyes of his subject.
Two smaller versions of the seated Generalissimo, done in clay, are near the massive head on which Chen is working. For reference in achieving the most accurate portrait possible, Chen has a folder of perhaps 100 different heads hot photographs of Chiang Kai-shek. These show the late President from almost every possible angle during a long period of his mature years.
Nearby in Chen's studio are figures of the "Laughing Buddha," Kuan Yin, the "Goddess of Mercy," and a number of other pieces of his work. Among his own favorites is a charming two-figure statue of an elderly woman playing a game of "hands" with her small grandson. It has been cast in bronze. Chen is taking no new commissions during the next three years so he can concentrate all his efforts on the statue of the late President.
As he works, Chen often has the company of a large black-and-white tomcat, which curls up on a ladder step or in some other place from which he can see what's going on. Apparently he approves. A reminder of his companionship is there, even when the living actuality is not. A modeled figure of the cat is curled up at the base of another statue.
Not far away, eight other sculptors are at work under Chen's supervision on the lower parts of the Chiang Kai-shek statue - the arms, the body, the legs and the chair in which he is seated. The late President is portrayed wearing a long Mandarin gown, traditional and dignified attire for older men and still frequently worn.
The making of large pieces of statuary requires special knowledge as well as art. The sculptor must be thoroughly familiar with the properties of the materials in which he is working - the clay from which the figure is modeled and the molten bronze in which it is cast to provide the enduring form. The sculptor also must know mechanics and engineering involved, including the balance of a heavy object. The statue of Chiang Kai-shek will weigh approximately 25 tons.
Chen I-fan believes the statue of the late President will be the greatest of his portraits in bronze. He also expects it to be one of his last of this kind. He hopes subsequently to spend most of his time on more stylized and symbolic subjects - the expression of ideas seen or felt by the artist rather than close photographic representations of life.
A striking piece of Chen's work is no longer in his possession, or even in Asia. It is a 23-foot bronze piece in three sections entitled "The Spirit of the Team" - representing two l6-man teams engaged in a tug of war. This work was sent to Madrid for an international art exposition. It was there at the time of the Republic of China's withdrawal from the United Nations to protest seating of the Chinese Communist regime. Spain subsequently shifted diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Peiping. In the removal of the free Chinese Embassy from Madrid, the bronze "Spirit of the Team" didn't get sent home. It presumably is in a Madrid museum or in storage. Chen isn't sure.
Chen I-fan has traveled extensively in Europe and elsewhere, observing famous works of sculpture. He especially admires the work of the French sculptor Aguste Rodin (1840-1917), who is probably best known in the Western world for his statue "The Thinker."
The Chung Cheng Memorial is much more than bronze, granite and marble. In his lifetime, President Chiang always preferred what was useful and especially what served young people. The Sun Yat-sen Memorial in Taipei, where his own memorial services were held, has Taiwan's biggest and best auditorium.
Cheng Cheng will be distinctive - in contrast to most memorials - as a result of the many uses to which it will be put. Not the least of these will be the provision of a large park in the heart of a city of more than 2 million people. Plans have already begun to establish a repertoire theater to produce the Chinese operas that President Chiang loved so much. The big auditorium will serve civic as well as cultural needs.
President Chiang was a thoughtful and magnanimous person in life. It is appropriate that his memorial will continue to reflect his desire to serve the people in as many ways as possible.