The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanking and the retreat of the National Revolutionary Army in the Second Sino-Japanese War, by the Imperial Japanese Army. Beginning on December 13, 1937, the massacre lasted six weeks. The perpetrators also committed other war crimes such as mass rape, looting, torture, and arson. The massacre is considered to be one of the worst wartime atrocities.
Shu Qingchun, known by his pen name Lao She, was a Chinese novelist and dramatist. He was a writer of 20th-century Chinese literature, known for his novel Rickshaw Boy and the play Teahouse (茶馆). He was of Manchu ethnicity, and his works are known for their vivid use of the Beijing dialect.
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II is a bestselling 1997 non-fiction book written by Iris Chang about the 1937–1938 Nanjing Massacre — the mass murder and mass rape of Chinese civilians committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It describes the events leading up to the Nanjing Massacre, provides a graphic detail of the war crimes and atrocities committed by Japanese troops, and lambastes the Japanese government for its refusal to rectify the atrocities. It also criticizes the Japanese people for their ignorance about the massacre. It is one of the first major English-language books to introduce the Nanjing Massacre to Western and Eastern readers alike, and has been translated into several languages. The book significantly renewed public interest in Japanese wartime conduct in China, Korea, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
The Good Earth is a historical fiction novel by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931 that dramatizes family life in a 20th-century Chinese village in Anhwei. It is the first book in her House of Earth trilogy, continued in Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935). It was the best-selling novel in the United States in both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, and was influential in Buck's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Buck, who grew up in China as the daughter of American missionaries, wrote the book while living in China and drew on her first-hand observation of Chinese village life. The realistic and sympathetic depiction of the farmer Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan helped prepare Americans of the 1930s to consider Chinese as allies in the coming war with Japan.
John Heinrich Detlef Rabe was a German businessman and Nazi Party member best known for his efforts to stop war crimes during the Japanese Nanjing Massacre and his work to protect and help Chinese civilians during the massacre that ensued. The Nanking Safety Zone, which he helped to establish, sheltered approximately 250,000 Chinese people from being killed. He officially represented Germany and acted as senior chief of the European-U.S. establishment that remained in Nanjing, the Chinese capital at the time, when the city fell to the Japanese troops.
Bridge of Birds is a fantasy novel by Barry Hughart, first published in 1984. It is the first of three novels in The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox series. The original draft of Bridge of Birds is included in a special slipcased version of the omnibus collection, The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, released by Subterranean Press in 2008.
Death Comes for the Archbishop is a 1927 novel by American author Willa Cather. It concerns the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory.
Tobacco Road is a 1932 novel by Erskine Caldwell about a dysfunctional family of Georgia sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Although often portrayed as a work of social realism, the novel contains many elements of black comedy and sensationalism which made it a subject of controversy following its publication. It was dramatized for Broadway by Jack Kirkland in 1933 and ran for eight years. A 1941 film version, played mainly for laughs, was directed by John Ford, with many of the darker plot elements altered or removed.
Joseph Clark Grew was an American career diplomat and Foreign Service officer. He is best known as the ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1941 and as a high official in the State Department in Washington from 1944 to 1945. He opposed American hardliners, sought to avoid war, and helped to ensure the soft Japanese surrender in 1945 that enabled a peaceful American occupation of Japan after the war.
The 1931 China floods, or the 1931 Yangtze–Huai River floods, occurred from June to August 1931 in China, hitting major cities such as Wuhan, Nanjing and beyond, and eventually culminated in a dike breach along Lake Gaoyou on 25 August 1931.
Dragon Seed is a 1944 American war drama film, about Japan's WWII-era actions in China.The movie directed by Jack Conway and Harold S. Bucquet, based on the 1942 novel of the same name by Pearl S. Buck. The film stars Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, Aline MacMahon, Akim Tamiroff, and Turhan Bey. It portrays a peaceful village in China that has been invaded by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The men in the village choose to adopt a peaceful attitude toward their conquerors, but the headstrong Jade (Hepburn) stands up to the Japanese.
The hundred man killing contest was a newspaper account of a contest between Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, two Japanese Army officers serving during the Japanese invasion of China, over who could kill 100 people the fastest while using a sword. The two officers were later executed on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their involvement.
Dark Laughter is a 1925 novel by the American author Sherwood Anderson. It dealt with the new sexual freedom of the 1920s, a theme also explored in his 1923 novel Many Marriages and later works. The influence of James Joyce's Ulysses, which Anderson had read before writing the 1925 novel, is expressed in Dark Laughter.
The Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre is the representation of the events of the Nanjing Massacre as history, in various languages and cultural contexts, in the years since these events took place. This historiography is disparate and sometimes contested, owing to conflicting currents of Chinese and Japanese nationalist sentiment and national interest, as well as the fog of war.
Bloody Saturday is a black-and-white photograph taken on 28 August 1937, a few minutes after a Japanese air attack struck civilians during the Battle of Shanghai in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Depicting a Chinese baby crying within the bombed-out ruins of Shanghai South railway station, the photograph became known as a cultural icon demonstrating Japanese wartime atrocities in China. The photograph was widely published, and in less than a month had been seen by more than 136 million viewers. The photographer, Hearst Corporation's H. S. "Newsreel" Wong, also known as Wong Hai-Sheng or Wang Xiaoting, did not discover the identity or even the sex of the injured child, whose mother lay dead nearby. The baby was called Ping Mei. One of the most memorable war photographs ever published, and perhaps the most famous newsreel scene of the 1930s, the image stimulated an outpouring of Western anger against Japanese violence in China. Journalist Harold Isaacs called the iconic image "one of the most successful 'propaganda' pieces of all time".
China Sky is a 1945 RKO Pictures film based on the novel by Pearl S. Buck. It was directed by Ray Enright and featured movie idol Randolph Scott, teamed with Ruth Warrick, Ellen Drew and Anthony Quinn. Although set in wartime China, Quinn and other lead actors portrayed Chinese characters, in keeping with other period films that employed Caucasian actors in Asian roles.
The Call is a novel published in 1985 by the American writer John Hersey. The novel, which is in the form of a fictionalized biography with letters and excerpts from Treadup's journal, presents the experience of David Treadup, an American Protestant missionary in China during the first half of the twentieth century. As the novel progresses, and China undergoes Japanese invasion and communist revolution, Treadup reconsiders whether his efforts to help China were useful and questions the usefulness of the Christian mission. Hersey based Treadup on a composite of six historical China missionaries, including his own father. Other historical figures appear, sometimes under their own names.
Four Generations Under One Roof is a 1944 novel by Lao She describing the life of the Chinese people during the Japanese Occupation. The novel is divided into three parts：Part 1 - Bewilderment (惶惑) .Part 2 - Ignominy (偷生).Part 3 - Famine (饥荒)
The 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the American author Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces." Buck was the first female American to be awarded the Nobel Prize and the third American recipient following Eugene O'Neill in 1936 and Sinclair Lewis in 1930. She was also the fourth woman to receive the prize.
