Kinmen is famous for a few things in Taiwan: gaoliang liquor, green veggies, and cutlery. The latter two are both related, believe it or not. (And not because you need a knife to cut your veggies, either!) The answer is artillery shells.
Over two decades of shelling, almost 1,000,000 shells from China landed on Kinmen (half of them within the first month and half beginning in 1958). Hence Kinmen's green veggies are prized for their extra high iron content, and you have lots of high-quality steel lying around just waiting to be used for something. That's when soldiers started a trend of turning shrapnel into knives. Artillery shrapnel:
Professionals later began using the essentially free material to create all kinds of knives for common use, and now sell a wide variety in Kinmen and abroad. They'll even make knives to order. Shrapnel was gradually replaced by steel casings from inside propaganda shells, and in the 90's smiths began using shell casings themselves (mostly from propaganda shells, which didn't explode into pieces on impact):
You can see old propaganda materials still wrapped up inside this one:
We visited Kinmen's most famous workshop, now called "Maestro Wu" (ª÷¦X§Q), where you can watch the process. It's operated by two friendly brothers, who were quite amenable to sit around and chat about their business. Here's a shot of their older workshop, where we stopped by before visiting the larger one.
Their main workshop also has an impressive pile of shells which locals found and sold to them for making knives. In their abundance, shells were originally very cheap (around 50 NT each), but now go for about 500-600 NT.
Surprisingly, it only takes a few minutes to turn a chunk of steel into a sharp and shiny cleaver using modern equipment. They cut off a rectangular 1 kg section of steel and quickly heat it up, then flatten it out a bit using a hydraulic forging hammer:
Then they cut a slit in it towards one end and, using a normal hammer, beat that part out perpendicular to the rest to form the handle piece:
Then flatten it out more to reach its final thickness:
Trim the edges:
Grind the blade to shiny and sharpen it up:
A single shell casing can make about 40-60 knives. "Maestro Wu" (the older brother) told us he's made so many knives that he "makes knives in his dreams, too." For an overview of the process, I shot this display at a separate location:
We bought a knife, too--China's belligerence has indirectly become my most effective tool for defeating vegetables.