(via) This South China Morning Post video introduces Wu Tseng-dong, a 3rd generation blacksmith on the small Taiwanese island of Kinmen. The craftsman makes his living turning spent Chinese artillery shells into beautiful kitchen knives. Aside from being a pretty cool way to recycle terrifying weapons of war, it might also be personally therapeutic for “Maestro Wu”, who survived countless artillery attacks as a child.

Gastro-Obscura recently published an interesting piece on the Maestro. Here’s an excerpt:

Beginning on August 23, 1958, when Wu was barely a year old, roughly 479,500 bombs were dropped by mainland China on Kinmen over the span of 44 days, an event later called the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. “The only time they stopped bombing was during meal times,” Wu says, noting how his mother would seize those moments of quiet to run out of their bunker and into the fields to harvest sweet potatoes to eat before the shelling resumed.