In the early hours of December 2, 1948, a British journalist looked out of his window at the Peace Hotel in Shanghai. In the dark outside, he saw men with long poles carrying heavy boxes from the Bank of China across the Bund and loading them onto a customs vessel at the quay.
Soldiers had sealed off the Bund and stood with loaded rifles at every corner. What George Vine saw - and reported to his paper in London that night - was the start of a critical episode of the country's civil war: Chiang Kai-shek's transfer of the country's gold, silver and foreign exchange from the mainland to Taiwan.
Over the next 12 months, Chiang moved by sea and air millions of taels of gold, a treasure trove that became the reserves for the New Taiwan dollar and made possible the island's recovery from war and high inflation and its remarkable economic success in the decades to follow.
For Beijing, it was an unforgivable theft of assets that belonged to the nation. For the Kuomintang, it was a legitimate decision by the national president to save them from falling into the hands of a rebel army. Without the money, the Nationalist government would probably have not survived in Taiwan.
A new book, The Archives of Gold, has provided a rare, detailed account of the operation. The author is Dr Wu Sing-yung, a professor of radiological sciences and medicine at the University of California at Irvine and the son of the man who masterminded the operation.
His father, lieutenant general Wu Song-ching, head of the finance and budget department of the KMT government, was entrusted by Chiang with moving the gold; he was in charge of the military budget for 15 years. From 1946 until a week before his death in 1991, he kept a daily diary.