Nanjing plans to add the
names of 90,000 captive soldiers that were killed by invading
Japanese soldiers in 1937 to a memorial wall at a newly opened
museum.
The wall has already
been nicknamed the "wailing wall" by residents in Nanjing, capital
of Jiangsu Province. It was built beside a pit at the Nanjing
Massacre Museum where thousands of Chinese are buried, all of whom
were among the 300,000 people murdered in the Nanjing Massacre,
also known as the Rape of Nanking to Westerners, in December 1937,
Beijing News reported today.
The museum is contacting
historians in Taiwan Province in hopes that they can provide more
information about the military system of the Kuomintang, the ruling
party at the time. It also hopes the historians can provide the
names of the murdered captives, the report said.
"Killing prisoners is
against international law and we hope we can inscribe those
soldiers' names onto the wall to commemorate their deaths," Zhu
Chengshan, curator of the museum told the newspaper.
More than 12,000
civilian names have already been added to the wall to remind the
world of the most painful atrocity in China's history, the report
said.
"There were only 3,000
names inscribed to represent the 300,000 killed compatriots when we
built the wall," Zhu said. "The list later developed to more than
12,000 names and now we have another 2,000 more names waiting to be
added."
The museum will extend
the wall to reach the nearby pit so that it can add more names, Zhu
said.
The six-week wave of
killing by Japanese soldiers after the fall of Nanjing, then the
Chinese capital, was among the bloodiest episodes of Japan's
invasion of China between 1937 and 1945.
On July 7, 1937,
invading Japanese forces assaulted Lugou Bridge in Beijing and
Chinese soldiers responded with gun fire. This became known as the
Lugou Bridge Incident, or the "July 7 Incident". It marked the
formal beginning of the War of Resistance against the Japanese
Invasion.
More than 300,000
Chinese are believed to have been murdered and thousands raped in
the Nanjing Massacre.
(Shanghai Daily
December 14, 2007)
