Mark Gagnon

If there's anything I missed, please don't hesitate to drop a comment.

Correct me.

I'm not immune to

To being corrected, I'd love to know the truth and the actual information.

Furthermore, I also don't speak Mandarin, so if there's any words that I happen to mispronounce, I apologize.

We'll start off first with the city of Nanjing.

Many people call it Nanking.

That's the pronunciation that Americans in the English-language-speaking world used around 1937-38 when this atrocity happened.

And this was before they had like a full transliteration of Mandarin into the English language.

So they called it Nanking.

And that's kind of how it was cemented in history.

We know it now by the, you know, the correct Mandarin name of Nanjing.

So that's the one that I will use.

So where does it all begin?

There's going to be a lot of context here, but we'll start in 1937.

All right.

There is a war between China and Japan that had already torn through huge parts of the country.

And Nanjing, then the capital, was just next in the war path.

And for people living there, it didn't feel like the start of a historic atrocity.

It felt like just daily life slowly becoming unfamiliar.