The statues of Chiang Kai-shek (CKS) are the most controversial and affected objects of authoritarian legacy in contemporary Taiwan. The removal or retention of Chiang Kai-shek statues in public prominent spaces are emotionally charged actions that reflect the “polarisation” of Taiwanese society. My discussion uses a case study approach to analyse how one local community, the National Chengchi University (Guoli zhengzhi daxue 國立政治大學) (NCCU) in Taipei City, discussed and eventually removed only one of its two CKS statues in August 2018. This analysis of the “afterlife” of these statues is based on newspaper and social media reports, my own repeated visits to the statues, ethnographic fieldwork in 2016 and 2019 where I conducted interviews, and my own photographic documentation. Statues can have an afterlife when local communities give them new meanings and rearrange the space around them accordingly. This paper contributes a typology of how such statues become “localised” or palatable. The forms of afterlife include profanation, localisation, iconisation, aestheticisation and fortification. After years of documented protests and the promulgation of “transitional justice” as the new political framework between 2008 and 2017, these sacred “symbols commemorating authoritarian rule” were called for to be removed. The paper traces how the university administration first ignored, and then in 2017 initiated a deliberative process within the university which resulted in the different and contested afterlives for the statues. The analysis shows that it is the alumni group (rather than the protesting students) who benefit from these more open and democratic structures. They have been the most vocal in expressing their interests and as a potential source of valuable funding, have been successful in insisting on the localisation or fortification of the statues.