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Details of Chiang Kai-shek's attempts to recapture mainland to be made public

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Taiwan will declassify a set of confidential documents on a failed military attempt by the late Kuomintang generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to recover the mainland in the 1960s.

From the start of next month, visitors, including those from the mainland, will be allowed to visit Back Tzuhu, which has housed the secrets of Chiang's failed mission for nearly five decades.

The seven-hectare, crescent-shaped Back Tzuhu has been a restricted section of the Chiang Kai-shek Mausoleum in Tzuhu in the northern county of Taoyuan, according to previews of the classified documents given to media yesterday.

The site served as a wartime command centre for Chiang during Project Kuokuang, or the Project of National Glory, during the 1960s.

Sensing the right moment had arrived as the Communist government botched its economy with the disastrous 'Great Leap Forward', the outbreak of the Vietnam war and the prospect that the mainland might soon have a nuclear weapon, Chiang decided that the need to launch an counterattack and recover the mainland, which had been lost at the end of a bitter civil war in 1949, was urgent.

He ordered the construction of air-raid shelters and five military offices at Back Tzuhu, which served as a secret command centre in April 1964.

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