Nanjing

Sunday June 20, 2010
Highlights today: Nanjing Massacre Museum, which tells the story of the Japanese defeat of the China’s then capital, Nanjing, and the massacre the Japanese troops carried out after they took the city in 1937. Though it is impossible to know exactly, estimates are that 300,000 Chinese were brutally murdered during the massacre. Chinese troops, civilians, men, women, children and old people were systematically brutalized and killed under direction of the Japanese military leadership. For Chinese people, this is an extremely important event in their history. It is their “Holocaust”. It is important for them that everyone remembers their suffering and they are angry that many Japanese people deny the truth of the horrors of the Nanjing massacre.
We also went to a museum featuring the Chinese exam system. For hundreds of years, qualifying for a good job as a Chinese official depended on scoring well on the national exam. Every three years candidates arrived in the capital, Nanjing, to take the exam. In an enormous complex, thousands of candidates sat, each in their own 4x4x6 foot cell, to write the exam. They stayed in their cells for a whole week. They ate and slept there, they even went to the bathroom there. They went through elaborate measures to try to cheat on the exams. They smuggled in cheat sheets written on thin, edible paper. Sometimes they sewed information into the insides of their robes. Students are students, I guess.
Today’s souvenir idea: I wish I could get you all to pose for a souvenir picture. At the presidential palace, we watched as Chinese dressed up and posed as emperors and empresses in front of photo backgrounds of an imperial palace. It’s the Chinese equivalent of dressing up in costume for an old wild west, saloon scene/gunslinger photo!