Keenmen 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.

Keenmen, Kamui, the Cold War Island, Taiwan's DMZ. In 1949, this island was a site of a gruesome

battle to decide the fate of China. The conflict lasted for years and years, and Keenmen 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 Yubank, 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 Keenmen, and its Bayshan Broadcasting Wall, a weaponized wall of sound that still stands

and still broadcast today. That's after this.

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 Keenmen 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 Keenmen is to mainland China.

And on the coast of Keenmen, there's a village called Gooningto, 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 meant to withstand several bombings,

which it did. This wall of speakers was built to return fire to bombard mainland China with sound.

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