At meetings and conferences on the pres-ervation of historical monuments, one can often see a spry old lady dressed in a qipao contributing highly professional opinions on monument preservation. In fact, the Legislative Yuan's passage last year of additional regulations to the Cultural Heritage Preservation Law which allow private owners of historical monuments to add the equivalent floor area to other buildings when applying for planning permission, was largely the result of over a decade of concentrated lobbying by Yen Hsiu-feng.

Yen Hsiu-feng, a woman with an aura of legend about her, is chairperson of the management committee of the Li Family Compound in Luchou, and of the Protection and Development Association of Chinese Private Ancient Remains. She has also variously been a girl soldier in China's War of Resistance Against Japan, the wife of a high-ranking official, and, though one would never guess it, the victim of a political terror campaign.

When China's War of Resistance Against Japan began, Yen Hsiu-feng was a girl of just 17, studying at the girls' middle school in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Having witnessed since childhood her country's weakness and malaise, and its suffering at the hands of the warlords, she made a resolute decision to become a latter-day Hua Mulan (who, legend has it, became a soldier in place of her father) and join in the struggle with Japan.

Soldier girl

Yen Hsiu-feng's father owned a silk mill in Hangzhou, and was also a partner in a hotel. He and his wife had only the one daughter, on whom they had always doted, and they were naturally unwilling to see her go far away from home to fight the Japanese. But although Yen Hsiu-feng grew up in an era when females were subject to all kinds of limitations, at school she had displayed a character full of heroic spirit from an early age. Once she used her pocket money to buy toy swords and spears, and led younger children in fighting back against older boys in the school who liked to bully new pupils-for which her parents grounded her for two months.

To be allowed to join the nation's war effort, Hsiu-feng argued with her father for over five months. One evening he furtively called her upstairs, and said to her solemnly: "It has always been difficult to reconcile filial piety with loyalty to one's country. Today, I am willing to give my only treasure to my country. Go! But don't let your mother know for now-she will never agree to it. Don't make it even more painful for her!" Yen Hsiu-feng remembers how brightly the oil lamp beside her father's bed burned as he spoke these words.

So without telling her mother, she got ready to leave at dawn. But somehow her mother knew anyway, and implored her not to leave. Weeping as she saw her daughter walk away without looking back, she cried out: "How can you be so hard-hearted?" Little did she know the struggle going on in Hsiu-feng's heart, or the effort it took to force her leaden feet forward.

Front-line love

On leaving her parents, Hsiu-feng went from pampered only daughter to girl soldier fighting in the defense of her nation, and was assigned to organization and training work among the civilian population of front-line Fuyang County in Zhejiang. In 1938, the entire area north of the Fuchun River had fallen to the enemy. The day after the Dong Shazhou military campaign began, her unit needed someone to carry despatches across Japanese blockade lines to a front-line unit. Yen Hsiu-feng immediately volunteered for this task, and after nightfall set off alone across a mountain swept by Japanese army searchlights, not arriving until dawn the next day. Not only had her clothes been ripped by tree branches, her hands and feet had also been cut and grazed by the sharp stones as she crawled along the ground. But Yen feels: "That was the most worthwhile thing I ever did in my life. When I went back to the mainland a few years ago, I could still remember the path I followed over the mountain."

Amid the chaos of war, Hsiu-feng got to know Li You-pang, who had come from Taiwan to join the struggle against Japan. Li adored the Hangzhou lass, and wrote her a letter every day as he sought to win her heart. But the content of these love letters was all to do with the affairs of the nation and people. Patriotic action played Cupid's role, and after two years the couple were married and continued their war effort together, in a touching tale of wartime love.

From official's wife to convict

When she left home at a tender age, Yen Hsiu-feng never imagined she would marry a man from Taiwan, or that she would spend the greater part of her life there. After the defeat of Japan, Hsiu-feng followed her husband to Taiwan, where he became vice-chairman of the Kuomintang's Taiwan Province party committee, and also president of both the Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News and the Taiwan Film Company, while she had an important post in the KMT Department of Women's Affairs. But in the atmosphere of paranoia following the ROC government's retreat to Taiwan after its defeat in the civil war on the mainland, in 1950 Yen Hsiu-feng was imprisoned as a communist spy.

In prison, Yen ate the food her husband specially prepared for her, and hoped for the injustice to be reversed. But after a while she noticed that the food brought by her husband's family was no longer her favorite dishes, and she worried that he might be ill. One day she asked her three-year-old son: "Where's Daddy?" The guileless child told her straight out: "Daddy's dead!" Only then did Yen Hsiu-feng learn that her husband had been executed as a traitor.

At that time, the government had only recently moved to Taiwan, and post-war reconstruction had not yet got under way. With so many "communist agents" and "traitors" under arrest, Yen shared a cell less than six square meters in area with over 20 other people, and they even had to take turns to lie down and sleep. Although filled with indignation and doubt, she had no choice but to grit her teeth and put up with the situation. "I told myself, when the wave breaks over you, all you can do is stand and take it."

After 15 years, Yen Hsiu-feng was released from prison. Standing on streets that had changed beyond recognition, 45 years old and penniless, all she could do was start again from scratch.

A rocky road

Bringing up five children on her own, she endured all kinds of hardships. Early one morning, as two of her children walked in front of her through heavy rain, with plastic sheets draped over their shoulders for raincoats, helping her to carry vegetables to market, she looked at them and decided she had to find another way to make a living. She was fluent in English, so she started the World Translation Service, and her income became more regular.

In her sixties, once her children all had families and careers of their own, Yen Hsiu-feng devoted her efforts to preserving the Li Family Compound in Luchou, and to compiling materials on the life of her husband Li You-pang, in the hope that history would clear his name. Recently the government offered her and her family compensation of NT$6 million for Li You-pang's death, but Yen and her children felt that although the government had made a formal apology, it had not made public the true circumstances surrounding his unjust execution, so they refused the compensation.

A towering pine

The way this mainland wife was accepted by a traditional Taiwanese clan and has become chairperson of the management committee of their ancestral home, can be attributed not only to her seniority, unbending principles and utter selflessness, but also to her matchless warmhearted enthusiasm and indomitable fighting spirit.

Working constantly for the renovation of the Li Family Compound, she spends whole days on the phone speaking with the architecture scholars who make up the renovation committee, sometimes talking past midnight. Everyone, including scholars, government officials and even her family, both admire and fear her determination and resolve. "Ms. Yen isn't just strong, she's dauntless. She's not a supple and resilient bamboo, she's a sturdy pine tree, always standing tall against any wind or frost," says architecture scholar Yen Ya-ning, a renovation committee member.

"Although Ms. Yen has had a difficult life, she has tremendous strength and self-confidence. Both in academic and political circles, she has the support of many people of all political persuasions," says Hsueh Chin, another committee member, who is himself often mentioned favorably by Yen Hsiu-feng. She once came to the rescue of the cause of preserving Taiwan's cultural heritage by collecting over 4000 signatures on a petition which she presented to President Lee. The signatories were almost all celebrities and people of outstanding achievement. This was something few others in government or private circles could have achieved.

In the spring of 1992, at a memorial service to mark the fortieth anniversary of Li You-pang's death, Yen Hsiu-feng asserted steadfastly: "This life has been hard and difficult for me. If one day I get to Heaven, I'm sure that You-pang will say to me: 'You've had a hard time of it; thank you for what you've done.'" But she also says to herself: "Preserving our cultural heritage is no different from the great task of fighting the Japanese. The march of a great age resounds vibrantly in my heart, forever. . . ."

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In her youth, amid the fires of war, beautiful Hangzhou girl Yen Hsiu-feng met and married the handsome young Taiwanese Li You-pang. (courtesy of Yen Hsiu-feng)