Ting Yao-tiao

During the martial law period, the Kuomintang government offered substantial rewards to anyone who reported Communist spies, making false reports a common method of taking revenge for certain slights.^[2] To retaliate for telling her friend Shih Shui-huan [zh] not to get together with him, an informant reported Ting to the authorities for having a banned book on her desk.^[3] Initially, her colleague stopped the letter implicating Ting, but after he himself was suspected of leading a Communist Party branch at the post office, he confessed to having blocked the accusation.^[2] Thus, Ting was arrested while she was pregnant and imprisoned in 1953, according to Kuo, who had also been imprisoned,^[2] or in 1954, according to the Taipei Times. Ting and Shih were executed by firing squad on July 24, 1956.^[4][5]

Before her execution, Kuo cut himself to meet Ting at the infirmary, where she was getting an injection for her newborn child. Ting gave him a metal cigarette tin with a lock of her hair and a farewell letter inside. After his early release in 1975 due to Chiang Kai-shek's death, he learned of Ting's execution and buried the tin under a tree at National Tainan Girls’ Senior High School.^[2] It was rediscovered in 2015 after a typhoon unearthed the tree.^[3] Ting was also remembered by her classmates in the alumni association's 90th anniversary journal.^[2]