The Luku Incident

At one of the harshest moments of Cold War confrontation in the 1950s — while the smoke of the Chinese Civil War had not yet fully cleared — Taiwan’s authoritarian government launched the largest anti-communist purge of the martial law era in an effort to eradicate underground armed networks affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. The “Luku Incident” of late 1952 became not only the largest military suppression campaign and mass arrest operation of Taiwan’s White Terror period, but also one of the bloodiest political tragedies to devastate ordinary rural communities, destroying countless farming and mining families who had little understanding of the ideological conflict consuming the island around them.

What began as a military operation against an underground communist base soon transformed into a sweeping political catastrophe that engulfed the mountainous regions of Taipei County — present-day New Taipei City — dragging an isolated and largely illiterate mountain village into the abyss of torture, wrongful imprisonment, and collective terror.

The origins of the tragedy lay in the post-February 28 expansion of the Taiwan Provincial Working Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Following the 1947 uprising and massacre, underground communist networks gradually spread throughout Taiwan. Led by figures such as Tsai Hsiao-chien, the organization sought to coordinate with the broader strategy of “liberating Taiwan” promoted by the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland.

In the rugged mountains between Shiding, Xizhi, and Ruifang, organizers established a secret guerrilla base known as the “Taiwan People’s Armed Defense Force.” Hidden among tea plantations and mining settlements deep within the hills of Luku, the network attempted to recruit impoverished farmers, coal miners, and progressive intellectuals in preparation for a future communist invasion of Taiwan, hoping to create a local resistance force capable of cooperating with the People’s Liberation Army.

Yet the underground movement began collapsing rapidly after 1950, when Tsai Hsiao-chien himself was arrested and defected to the authorities. Over the next two years, intelligence agencies painstakingly traced surviving underground networks throughout Taiwan. Eventually, their attention focused upon Luku — one of the final remaining strongholds of the provincial communist organization.

Late on the night of December 28, 1952, beneath the freezing winds of the Taipei mountains, the government launched a massive operation code-named the “Luku Project.”

The Taiwan Garrison Command and Bureau of Investigation mobilized more than ten thousand personnel, including infantry divisions, military police, and intelligence agents. The entire mountain region surrounding Luku was sealed off under full military lockdown. Checkpoints were established along every mountain road, enforcing a strict “entry permitted, exit forbidden” policy while troops advanced inward through systematic search operations.

Against the overwhelming force of a modern army, the several dozen underground guerrilla members hiding within the mountains quickly collapsed under combat and pursuit. Some leaders escaped temporarily into exile, while others — including Chen Pen-chiang — were captured. Within only a few days, the armed base that the regime had portrayed as a grave threat to national survival was completely destroyed.

But the collapse of the guerrilla network did not satisfy the state’s fury.

What followed instead was an extraordinarily brutal expansion of repression against the civilian population.

Before military forces withdrew, intelligence agencies converted the local Luku Guanyin Temple into a temporary interrogation prison and detention camp. Hundreds of local villagers — farmers, miners, laborers, and even children barely in their teens — were rounded up indiscriminately simply for being suspected of carrying supplies, delivering food, or maintaining personal contact with underground members.

Many of these villagers were completely illiterate and possessed little understanding of communism itself.

Yet inside the darkened temple halls, they encountered unimaginable brutality.

Under relentless interrogation, Bureau of Investigation agents subjected detainees to electric shocks, water torture, suspension beatings, and savage physical abuse that left limbs permanently broken. Day and night, the sacred Buddhist halls became scenes of terror and agony. Unable to endure the torture, many villagers eventually pressed bloody fingerprints onto confessions and accusation lists already prepared in advance by the secret police.

The military tribunals that followed revealed the full extremity of authoritarian justice under Cold War paranoia.

More than two hundred people were ultimately prosecuted and sentenced in what became the largest armed suppression case of Taiwan’s White Terror era. Among them, thirty-five individuals — including local villagers and progressive intellectuals — were condemned to death and executed at Taipei’s Machangding execution grounds. Nearly one hundred others received life imprisonment or prison terms exceeding ten years. Some villagers, permanently disabled or mentally broken by torture, disappeared silently within prison walls.

The consequences for Luku itself were catastrophic.

After the purge, the once peaceful mountain village — formerly filled with tea harvests and miners’ songs — was left devastated. Many adult men had been executed or imprisoned. Fields fell abandoned. Women and children who survived were branded as “families of communist spies,” their property confiscated and their lives subjected to decades of surveillance, poverty, humiliation, and social isolation.

Viewed through the broader lens of history, the 1952 Luku Incident was not merely a successful counterinsurgency operation or anti-espionage campaign. It became one of the defining examples of how state violence during Taiwan’s White Terror inflicted collective trauma upon the island’s grassroots communities.

Through torture, mass arrests, and arbitrary military trials, the authoritarian state demonstrated to the entire population that martial law permitted no challenge to its authority.

Today, Luku Guanyin Temple has long since returned to religious tranquility, and memorial monuments now stand within the mountain region commemorating the victims. Among them is a steel sculpture symbolizing shattered bones and the distortion of history itself — a silent witness to the suffering endured there decades ago.

In recent years, many of the original convictions connected to the Luku Incident have been formally overturned following investigations by Taiwan’s government and Control Yuan.

Yet when modern Taiwanese society looks back upon the catastrophe that unfolded in those mountain villages more than seventy years ago, the scars of history remain painfully visible.

The tragedy serves as a solemn reminder that the rule of law and human rights now cherished in Taiwan were not achieved without sacrifice. Behind them lie the suffering, blood, and broken lives of countless ordinary people like the villagers of Luku — individuals crushed by the machinery of authoritarianism and the tragedies of their time, often without fully understanding why they had been condemned at all.