Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park: a lakeside gathering of Chiang Kai-shek statues

After Taiwan’s democratisation, countless statues of former president Chiang Kai-shek that once stood in schools, parks, and public squares were taken down. For decades during the authoritarian era his image had been ubiquitous — practically every campus and town square had one — so when attitudes shifted, communities faced a genuine question of what to do with so many figures at once. Rather than scrapping them, from 2000 onward many were relocated to this park beside Cihu in Daxi, near the Cihu Mausoleum where Chiang’s remains rest.

The result is a park founded in the late 1990s that now holds well over a hundred statues — records noted around 150 by 2008 — ranging from small busts to towering full-length figures. One striking piece, ‘Wounds and Regeneration,’ was reassembled from dozens of segments of a statue removed from Kaohsiung. Daxi was chosen because Chiang had a long association with the area: his temporary resting place at Cihu sits just up the road, and the surrounding hills reminded him of his hometown in mainland China.

Wandering the lakeside paths, you pass statue after statue in wildly different poses and styles — seated, standing, on horseback, in military dress or scholar’s robes — an oddly moving, sometimes surreal experience that says as much about how Taiwan has reckoned with its past as about the man depicted. The setting beside the water keeps the mood calm and reflective.

It rewards an unhurried, observant visit. Look closely and you’ll notice the same subject rendered in dozens of artistic conventions, and small plaques sometimes indicate which town or institution each statue came from — a quiet record of how widely his image once spread. Photographers tend to love the repetition and the way the figures cluster against the greenery and the lake.

At the adjacent Cihu Mausoleum, military honor guards change on the hour, roughly 9:00 to 17:00, performing a precise drill that’s become a popular draw. Time your visit to catch a changeover near the top of an hour. The mausoleum itself — a former villa where Chiang’s body is interred above ground in anticipation of an eventual return to the mainland — is a short walk from the sculpture park and forms a natural pairing.

Admission is free. The easiest car-free route is the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle Cihu Line, which links Taoyuan and Zhongli stations to the park; weekend and weekday frequencies differ, so a peek at current timetables first helps. Combine it with nearby Daxi Old Street — famous for its baroque shophouse façades and braised dried tofu — and you have a relaxed, complete Taoyuan day trip.