China 2015, Day 3: Nanjing

Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall

The morning of Day 3, having dried off from my day of moisture in Hangzhou, I headed back to Shanghai’s high-speed train station.  This time the destination was Nanjing (formerly known as Nanking).  Nanjing was the first capital of the Ming Dynasty and it means “Southern Capital”.  (Can you guess what city’s name means “Northern Capital”?)  At times in the 14th and 15th centures, it was the largest city in the world (having been preceded by Hangzhou).  I was surprised to learn that Nanjing was the capital of China for much of the 1st half of the 20th century during the time of the Nationalists.  But it made sense that Nanjing was the Chinese capital during that time.  This explained why the Rape of Nanking took place there.  And learning about the Rape of Nanking was the reason I went to Nanjing.

I had previously wondered why the Imperial Japanese forces carried out a massacre on what I thought was a secondary Chinese city.  Now I understand that it was a 6-week orgy of violence to celebrate the overthrow and occupation of the capital of the former great empire.  As I had been learning since visiting Singapore in 2012. the Imperial Japanese forces really were the Nazis of the East.  The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall is basically a holocaust museum.  It was the saddest place I had been since touring the site of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 2011.

Most of the government and military had fled from Nanjing in early December 1937 as the Japanese advanced.  The civilian population was left to mostly fend for themselves.  Ultimately, an estimated 300,000 citizens of Nanjing were brutally slaughtered by the invading Imperial Japanese forces.  Over 20,000 women were raped.  Most were then tortured and killed.  One third of the city was destroyed by arson.  The Japanese Imperial forces committed atrocities that I won’t even describe here.  The Chinese continue to believe that Japan has never sufficiently apologized for the massacre.  There are right-wingers in Japan who deny the massacre, just like deniers of the European Holocaust.

[Some of the pictures below are very disturbing.]

The little girl in the picture above reminds me of the schoolchildren that were filing in to see the memorial.  One little girl look at me with eyes full of excitement.  She tugged on her friend’s sleeve and pointed at me.  Next she tugged on her mother’s sleeve and pointed at me.  I was smiling back the whole time.  Me, a foreign celebrity!

Presidential Palace

My visit to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall was the most somber part of my trip.  In a way, it was the most important part of my trip, the Forbidden City and Great Wall notwithstanding.  Fortunately, today Nanjing is a thriving city with much to see and do.  My first stop after the memorial was the Presidential Palace.  The palace was originally built by the Qing Dynasty for government purposes after they suppressed the Taiping Rebellion in southern China in 1864.  In 1912, it became the Presidential Palace when Sun Yat-sen declared the Republic of China, with Nanjing as its capital.

Ming Palace

My next stop left me very confused.  I wanted to see the ruins of the 14th-century Ming Palace.  The Ming Palace was the precursor to the Forbidden City, as Nanjing was the Ming Dynasty’s capital before Beijing.  I looked and looked, but couldn’t find the ruins.  Maybe I didn’t look in all the right places.

Time for an adventure in Nanjing!

Compared to Day 1 (missed most of it thanks to a delayed flight) and Day 2 (rain!), Day 3 was going swimmingly at this point (despite the missing palace ruins).  I was right on schedule.  My next stop was to be Zijin Shan (Purple Mountain) to see Sun Yat-sen’s grand mausoleum and, if time allowed, the tomb of the first Ming emperor.  I waited and waited and waited, but the bus I needed to take never arrived.  (While I was waiting at the bus stop, a middle-aged man kept staring at me.  He wasn’t quite as cute as the schoolgirl earlier at Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.  I had read before my trip that I should be prepared to get stared at.)  It was time to change plans on the fly.  I was disappointed to miss the mausoleum, which apparently is quite grand, but I was planning on seeing the site in Beijing where the rest of the Ming emperors are buried.  Most importantly, I had come to Nanjing first and foremost for Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, and I had accomplished that.  Anything else was secondary.

I decided to skip ahead to the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge.  I really wanted to see the Yangtze River, Asia’s longest river.  I didn’t have time to take an extended cruise along the Huangpu River in Shanghai, which would have brought me to where the Yangtze reaches the East China Sea.  The next best thing would be seeing the river as it passes Nanjing.  The bridge is significant to the Chinese because it was the first major construction project built by the Chinese in the ’60s after the Chinese Communists “divorced” from the Soviets.  Until then, the Chinese had largely relied on Soviet engineering skills.

I took the subway to the stop closest to the river.  To my disappointment, there was a large, restricted shipyard between the subway and the river.  So I began a somewhat lengthy, rather dark walk to the west, where the bridge crosses the river.  (It was late in the day by this point.)  I got to the bridge, but there wasn’t much to see.  I’m sure I was looking out at the river, but it was too dark to see anything.  Up on the bridge, high above me, I could barely make out one of the traditional statues of Chinese figures I had read about.  But there was no way I’d be able to get a good picture.  Well, my visit to the bridge was a bust, and I was really not up to taking the long, dark walk back to the subway.

I had noticed buses waiting at a corner near the bridge.  One of the buses was the #1 bus, which I had also seen stopping at the subway when I had gotten off.  To be prepared, I looked up the word for subway, “ditie”.  Another bus was at the stop when I got to it.  I asked him, “Ditie?” which I pronounced “DTA”.  He let me know I needed the #1 bus.  Another #1 bus came along soon enough.  I got on board and kept my eye out for the subway station.  During the ride, I kept wondering why I do the things I do.  Who else travels like this?  I got back on the subway and proceeded with my schedule for the evening.  (If I ever do a West-Central China tour, I’ll finally get to see the Yangtze River in Chongqing.)

City Wall

Confucian Confusion:  Confucius Temple (Fuzimiao)

My last stop in Nanjing was Confucius Temple, a place that caused me lots of confusion.  Not the least of which was the hard time I had finding the place, despite it being a major attraction.  On the street I asked people for Fuzimiao, the Chinese name.  But there’s that omnipreset accent issue.  Even a cop didn’t know what I was saying.  I finally found the place.  But I never did find an actual temple, just a huge Fanieul Hall Marketplace-type tourist area.  And I had already been confused while planning the trip.  I kept reading about Confucius Temple and also a popular tourist site called Fuzimiao.  It took me a while to realize they were one and the same.  But how is Fuzimiao Chinese for Confucius Temple?  Here’s where it gets interesting.  Confucius’s real Chinese name was Kong Qiu.  He was sometimes called Kong Fuzi, which translates as Grand Master Kong.  Jesuit missionaries westernized Kong Fuzi as Confucius.  How about that!  So Fuzimiao is the Temple of the Grand Master.  There you go!

One thing that wasn’t confusing, Fuzimiao was filled with so much energy, it ended my day in Nanjing on a fantastic high-point.  As I had a little trouble finding it, I was a little uncertain I wouldn’t also have a hard time finding the subway to get back to the train station.  I asked officials, who were very friendly, “Ditie?” pronouncing it DTA.  There was some (more) confusion.  Then I realized the correct pronunciation was more like DJ.  Knowing that came in handy later in my trip.  The important thing was that after a shaky start the first couple days, things were finally looking up for my trip!

[Factual information is primarily gathered from Wikipedia, so you know it must be true.]