Nantou shooting

The Nantou shooting was a mass murder that occurred in Nantou City, Taiwan on September 21, 1959, when 29-year-old Army Captain Li Hsing-ju killed 10 people and wounded four others, before committing suicide.^[1][2]

Li had fallen in love with 19-year-old Lu Mu-sheng, who rejected his advances and became engaged with her neighbour Yu Chuang Sheng, while he was stationed on the Quemoy islands. When Li returned home Lu introduced him to another girl, proposing that he should marry her instead.

Lu Mu-sheng and Yu Chuang Sheng were about to get married on the day of the shooting.^[3]

In the early hours of September 21, at approximately 2 a.m., Li broke into the house of Lu Mu-sheng and her family, carrying with him two rifles. He fatally shot Lu's father, her 10-year-old sister, her two brothers, aged 14 and 6 years, as well as her 30-year-old fiancé with a semi-automatic rifle, and then dragged her outside and critically wounded her with shots to the chest and leg.

Li also fired at two neighbours who came to investigate, killing one and wounding the other, and subsequently entered a second-storey apartment 50 yards away, where the girl to whom Miss Lu had introduced him lived together with her family. There he killed the girl's parents, her brother, and one of her sisters, and wounded her and another sister of hers. When police arrived at the scene and asked him to surrender, Li committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.^[3][4]