Keenman is a tiny island in the South China Sea.

It's only a little bigger than the city of San Francisco.

This island goes by a lot of names. Kinmen, Kamoi, the Cold War Island, Taiwan's DMZ.

In 1949, this island was the site of a gruesome battle to decide the fate of China.

The conflict lasted for years and years, and Kinman was fortified to the teeth with bombs,

tanks, and battalions of soldiers, and one very unique weapon, a 30-foot-tall concrete sound system.

I'm Annie Eubank, and this is Atlas of Skira,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we visit the tiny bow-tie-shaped island between China and Taiwan, the story of Kinmen and its Bayshan Broadcasting Wall,

a weaponized wall of sound that still stands and still broadcasts today.

That's after this.

The Umbudsman. When I was a kid. When I was a kid, my dad set up this stereo system in the living room.

It seemed to have a really complex wiring system,

and only my dad knew how to turn it on.

But I remember that it had these two really big black speaker boxes.

He only used it to play the soundtrack from the 2001 Nicholas Cage movie Captain Corelli's mandolin, over and over. But there's another sound system that I'll never forget.

In the summer of 2013, I moved to the island of Kinmen to teach English for a year. Even though I lived

smack dab at the center of this island, on clear days, I could see skyscrapers across the ocean.

The Chinese city of Shaman. That's how close Kinmen is to mainland China. And on the coast of

Keenman, there's a village called

Guningtoe, and this is where I encountered the Bayshan Broadcasting Wall, a massive, 30-foot-tall

sound system with 48 huge speakers built into it. It was built out of concrete, as if it was

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