Chinese pay homage to Nanjing Massacre victims, departed others
A long line of people had formed outside the memorial hall dedicated to the victims of the Nanjing Massacre. It was the morning of April 4 when the skies over the city in Jiangsu province had cleared after light rain the previous night. My visit to the site coincided with Qingming, a special day in China to remember the departed.
An arresting sculpture of a woman carrying a lifeless child at the entrance depicts the horrors the then-capital of China witnessed over weeks in 1937-38. Inside, a massive yard covered in gray cobblestones holds an open urn that symbolizes a collective resting place for the ashes of the victims. Their photos, some in black and white, some in sepia, fill the dark walls of the main building.
The site’s most grim section is the “pit of 10,000 bodies”, dug during the capture of Nanjing by imperial Japanese troops, according to a public notice. Today, it contains skeletal remains of some victims. The episode was among a series of massacres.
This war history is accompanied by a message of peace — illustrated by a different female-figure sculpture — at the exit of the site.
The museum also recognizes foreigners who sheltered Chinese people in the city’s “safe zone” at the time. An exhibit of The New York Times, dated Dec 11, 1937, shows a photo of “Chinese refugees waiting to be admitted to (the) international settlement”, with a related text story giving details of Nanjing’s collapse, including treason charges made by Chinese officials against “former Manchurian soldiers”.
Another area displays images from proceedings at the Tokyo Trial and the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal set up after the end of World War II.
An annual memorial day for the massacre victims is observed on Dec 13. Many visitors on April 4 placed white and yellow chrysanthemums at the museum, which was first built in 1985.
As I traveled from Beijing to Nanjing over the Qingming holiday, I caught glimpses of the tradition being followed in different provinces through my train window.
Qingming, also known as Tomb Sweeping Day, is said to have become popular in dynastic China as a way to honor ancestors. In addition, the concept of filial piety is a key tenet in Confucian teaching. People clean tombs, and burn joss sticks and paper — increasingly a rare sight in Beijing other than in old neighborhoods.
While crossing Hebei, I saw newly swept graves, which looked like mounds of earth on brown farm lands, with neatly arranged red decorations on top. As the landscape changed to a greener setting in Anhui, the tomb offerings, near rural brick houses, changed, slightly. In a visibly more industrialized Shandong, the flowers at gravesites were more colorful.
On the rainy evening in Nanjing as I stood on a wharf by the Qinhuai, created from a tributary of the Yangtze, I watched large crowds of tourists eagerly gathering for boat rides. The scene later reminded me of the 12th century painter Zhang Zeduan’s iconic scrollwork