5/31/2019 Nanjing Remembered – Everett Potter's Travel Report Home » Getaways » Asia » Nanjing Remembered ASIA / DISCOVERIES Nanjing Remembered / February 7, 2019 / 0 / 350 0 By Monique Burns https://www.everettpotter.com/2019/02/nanjing-remembered/ 1/18 5/31/2019 Nanjing Remembered – Everett Potter's Travel Report “Family Ruined,” Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. Photo Monique Burns Great capitals go in and out of fashion. Take Nanjing. For decades, the city has been eclipsed by Beijing, China’s political capital, 600 miles north. Shanghai, China’s ultramodern business capital, 200 miles east, has stolen the spotlight, too, with 21st-century skyscrapers and 19th-century European landmarks along its riverside Bund. As China actively promotes tourism among Westerners, Nanjing is nally re-emerging from the shadows. https://www.everettpotter.com/2019/02/nanjing-remembered/ 2/18 5/31/2019 Nanjing Remembered – Everett Potter's Travel Report Incredibly, Nanjing has been capital of 10 dynasties and regimes over 1,800 years. As Ming Dynasty capital, Nanjing–or Nanking–was the world’s largest city between 1358 and 1425, boasting a population of 500,000. Capital of Jiangsu Province since 1949, Nanjing is a leader in economics, education, politics and transportation. As for tourism, attractions include the 11th-century Confucius Temple, the 14th-century Ming Palace, and the 15th-century Porcelain Tower, rebuilt in 2015 and often listed among the world’s Seven Wonders. On Purple Mountain, the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum honors the “Father of Modern China” who established the republic in 1912. Like many older cities, Nanjing has a certain grittiness. But these days, Nanjing is cleaning itself up and preparing for its international close-up. Contemporary wonders include new luxury hotels like the Jumeirah Nanjing, designed by the late Zaha Hadid, and stylish eateries like Frenzy Fountain Teahouse Restaurant, a frothy-pink, Brit-accented fantasy serving up huge seafood platters and lots of bubbly. There’s even a craft brewery, Master Gao, named for the charismatic brewer who created Baby IP and Jasmine Tea Lager after honing his art in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and the Pacic Northwest. Skeletal remains from 1937 Rape of Nanjing PHOTO Monique Burns Yet Nanjing remains forever identied with the horric Rape of Nanjing, an event retold at the contemporary Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. https://www.everettpotter.com/2019/02/nanjing-remembered/ 3/18 5/31/2019 Nanjing Remembered – Everett Potter's Travel Report On December 13, 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Nanjing–then China’s capital–fell to the Japanese. Over the next 6-8 weeks, what followed was a nonstop orgy of arson, looting and violence. Some 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers were murdered in mass executions. Machine-gunned and bayoneted, they were thrown into the Yangtze River or huge pits. Many were buried alive. As for women, Japanese soldiers went from house to house, systematically raping tens of thousands of them, including nuns, pregnant women and the elderly. Not even small children were exempt. Some were even cut open to facilitate penetration. Many Japanese soldiers left sticks and bayonets protruding from their victims’ sexual organs. The Rape of Nanjing became known as the “Forgotten Holocaust,” a phrase from the 1997 book, The Rape of Nanjing: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Chinese-American journalist Iris Chang. But Chang’s reference doesn’t diminish Nazi Germany’s Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews from 1938 to 1945. Rather, it recognizes the Nanjing Massacre as another act of unspeakable horror and genocide. In 1985, nearly 50 years later, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall opened in the southwest Jiangdongmen area where thousands of victims had been murdered and thrown into mass graves. Built over the ” Pit of Ten Thousand Corpses,” the complex is part-memorial , part-museum, part- graveyard, part-peace garden. https://www.everettpotter.com/2019/02/nanjing-remembered/ 4/18 5/31/2019 Nanjing Remembered – Everett Potter's Travel Report Poignant sculpture of raped woman PHOTO Monique Burns The Sculpture Plaza, it’s lined with bronzes by sculptor Wu Weishan who studied at Nanjing Normal University and Washington University Graduate School of Art in St. Louis, Missouri. His artistic inuences include German sculptor Käthe Kollwitz whose Pietà-like “Mother With Her Dead Son,” inspired by the loss of her teenager, Peter, during World War I, forms the centerpiece of Neue Wache war memorial in Berlin. Fittingly, we rst encounter “Family Ruined,” a 40-foot sculpture of a mother and child. Her body curiously elongated, her hair disheveled, her mouth a silent wail, the mother holds her child’s limp, https://www.everettpotter.com/2019/02/nanjing-remembered/ 5/18 5/31/2019 Nanjing Remembered – Everett Potter's Travel Report lifeless body. It’s at once a reference to women who lost children during the massacre, to the genocide that Nanjing suered, and to “Mother China” and the loss of her great capital. Ranged atop a long, narrow reecting pool, “Fleeing From Calamity” depicts a series of bronze gures escaping the disaster. Half-clothed, a raped woman laments: “Only to die! Only to die! Only death can wipe o the stain!” An intellectual, bent under his wife’s limp body, bears the epitaph: “How wretched she was! My poor wife! The devil raped you, stabbed you…We were together even though we died.” Disembodied head in courtyard PHOTO Monique Burns Steps from a large brass memorial bell, in the adjacent courtyard, a towering stone cross lists the Nanjing Massacre dates: December 13, 1937 through January 1938. Yet many historians believe the atrocities continued into March, extending the Rape of Nanjing into a 12-week reign of terror. Stark black-marble walls show the number 300,000 in several languages. The generally accepted death toll, it’s considerably higher than the 40,000-50,000 count that the Japanese gave for the disaster they call the “Nanjing Incident.” The toll will likely climb even higher in coming decades as more bones are unearthed. A nearby sculpture makes me shudder. Rising from the ground are a large disembodied arm and hand and, several feet away, a bronze head. It’s a haunting symbol of victims buried alive during the Nanjing Massacre as well as victims still waiting to be unearthed. https://www.everettpotter.com/2019/02/nanjing-remembered/ 6/18 5/31/2019 Nanjing Remembered – Everett Potter's Travel Report Partially underground, the entrance to the Main Exhibit Hall was designed to evoke the feeling of entering a tomb, says Dr. Qi Kang, a professor at Nanjing’s Southeast University and the Memorial’s architect. In a darkened room, large-scale sets depict a destroyed city wall and ruined shops. Overlooking the scene are Nanjing’s victims, captured in sepia photographs. Surrounded by the sounds and ashing lights of gunre and exploding bombs, I relive the Battle of Nanjing. But just beyond is another ghastly sight: a sprawling pit strewn with skeletal remains. Infamous sword killing contest PHOTO Monique Burns A thousand artifacts, including photos , documents, charts, paintings and sculptures, trace the Nanjing Massacre. Among them: Tokyo’s Nichi Nichi Shimbun newspaper clipping about the contest between two soldiers to kill at least 100 Chinese citizens with swords. Reported like a sporting event, the clip shows them posing with swords beside the headline “Incredible Record–Mukai 106-105 Noda. Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into Extra Innings.” The Nanjing Massacre also produced heroes. Especially interesting to Westerners are displays about Americans and Europeans living and working in Nanjing. Born in Hamburg, Germany, John Rabe worked in Nanjing as a Siemens executive and local Nazi Party leader. In November 1937, as the Japanese advanced, Rabe, along with 22 other Americans and Europeans, organized the Nanjing Safety Zone, a two-square-mile area housing 250,000 Chinese civilians in colleges and foreign embassies. Largely successful , the Safety Zone wasn’t always https://www.everettpotter.com/2019/02/nanjing-remembered/ 7/18 5/31/2019 Nanjing Remembered – Everett Potter's Travel Report respected. Three days after Nanjing fell, Rabe wrote letters about the rapes of 100 girls at Ginling Women’s College and two women from Nanking Theological Seminary. In Berlin in 1938, Rabe lectured about the massacre. But, after sending a 260-page report to Hitler, Rabe was interrogated by the Gestapo. The Führer had signed an alliance with Japan in 1936. Rabe was forbidden to lecture or write further about Nanjing. Credited with saving 250,000 lives, the Hamburg businessman became known as the “Oskar Schindler of China” after the German industrialist immortalized in the 1993 blockbuster, Schindler’s List. Depicted in the 2009 movie, John Rabe, by German lmmaker Florian Gallenberger, his diaries were collected in the 1998 book, The Good Man of Nanjing. https://www.everettpotter.com/2019/02/nanjing-remembered/ 8/18 5/31/2019 Nanjing Remembered – Everett Potter's Travel Report Minnie Vautrin, American Goddess of Mercy PHOTO Monique Burns American “Goddess of Mercy” Wilhelmina Vautrin, a missionary from a small town outside Peoria, Illinois, founded Ginling Women’s College, now part of Nanjing University, in 1913. Some 10,000 Chinese women sheltered there during the Rape of Nanjing. A statue of Minnie Vautrin shows her lurching forward, arms outstretched, shielding her charges. The Nanjing Massacre profoundly aected Vautrin. In 1941, on leave from China, she–like author Iris Chang in 2004–committed suicide. Vautrin received China’s prestigious Emblem of the Blue Jade https://www.everettpotter.com/2019/02/nanjing-remembered/ 9/18 5/31/2019 Nanjing Remembered – Everett Potter's Travel Report posthumously. The 2000 book, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanjing, by Dr. Hua-ling Hu, professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, also honors her.