Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall
The Memorial for compatriots killed in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Forces of Aggression (simplified Chinese: 侵华日军南京大屠杀遇难同胞纪念馆; traditional Chinese: 侵華日軍南京大屠殺遇難同胞紀念館; pinyin: Qīnhuà Rìjūn Nánjīng dàtúshā tóngbāo Jìniànguǎn) is the Memorial Hall for the people killed in the Nanjing Massacre by the Japanese army in and around the then capital of China, Nanjing, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army on December 13, 1937. It is located in the southwestern corner of Nanjing known as Jiangdongmen, near a site where thousands of bodies were buried, called a “pit of ten thousand corpses” (simplified Chinese: 万人坑; traditional Chinese: 萬人坑; pinyin: wàn rén kēng).
On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army occupied Nanjing (at the time, Nanjing was known in English as Nanking). It is widely accepted that during the first six to eight weeks of their occupation, the Japanese army committed numerous atrocities, including rape, arson, and mass executions. There is, however, controversy over the scale of the alleged massacre, especially in Japan where a minor group of negationists even go so far as to claim that the massacre never happened.
The Chinese government insists that an estimated 300,000 civilians and unarmed Chinese soldiers were brutally slaughtered. This estimate of “more than 300,000 dead” was made from burial records and eyewitness accounts by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal and included in the verdict for Hisao Tani.
Corpses littered the streets and were seen afloat in rivers for weeks, and many structures in the city were burned down. Countless shops, stores, and residences were looted and sacked.
Japanese soldiers were also reported to have conducted killing competitions and bayonet practice using live Chinese prisoners. Approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred within the city during the first month of the occupation, according to t