He used to be the number one 'enemy of the people', responsible for murdering millions of communists, a slave of the American and British imperialists, and too much of a coward to fight the Japanese.
But Chiang Kai-shek is a new man now, his ancestral home meticulously restored and seen by 1.2 million visitors a year, including 30,000 from Taiwan, as Beijing has rewritten his history.
In Taiwan, where he was absolute ruler from 1949 to his death in 1975, his reputation has declined as people speak in public about his ruthless suppression of dissent, his secret police and his wayward private life. But, as his star wanes in Taiwan, so it rises on the mainland. As Beijing watches with alarm the rise of the independence movement on the island, the more it promotes Chiang as a symbol, if flawed, of national unity.
Tomorrow, in Beijing, President Jiang Zemin is due to meet Koo Chen-fu, chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation of Taiwan, the first high-level meeting between the two sides since 1993 and part of Beijing's efforts to hold official bilateral talks.
The history of Chiang's ancestral home reflects the changing requirements of the Communist Party in its 70-year war with the Nationalist government he used to head.
For the first 35 years of communist rule, the house, one of the most comfortable in Xikou, a small town in the east of Zhejiang province, was occupied by local officials. Anyone who came expressing an interest in Chiang's history was told there was nothing to see and ran the risk of being labelled a sympathiser with the reviled Nationalists.
Chiang was a 'traitor' and 'counter-revolutionary'. Red Guards destroyed his belongings, images and photographs of him were banned. In the 1980s, the line began to change. Beijing saw how democratisation in Taiwan led to rising calls for independence, in part because of anger at Chiang's terror campaigns and the privileges enjoyed by the mainlanders he had brought with him to Taiwan.