Not-so-ancient history

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China is a country with 5000 years of history, but most of what I have done in Nanjing reflects events of the last 90 or so (apart from the Ming tomb).

Tuesday's events focused on the middle of the 20th century. First was the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum. In December 1937, after a long campaign, the Japanese military finally captured Nanjing. What followed was an extremely bloody 6-week occupation during which hundreds of thousands of Chinese were murdered and thousands more were beaten or raped.

The museum portion had many artifacts from the time, as well as some displays telling the story of what had happened, both generally and with specific examples. It was both interesting and disturbing, and reminded me of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

However, what separated this location from the Holocaust Museum is that it was built on the site where several hundred victims were actually buried, and one of the halls was the open dig site, with skeletons still lying just as they were found.

The whole experience was very sobering, and I'm not really sure what else I can say about it without becoming depressing, so I'm going to move on.

Later in the day I went to the Presidential Palace, a holdover from the (brief) days between the end of World War II and the Communist victory over the Nationalists, resulting in the founding of the current People's Republic of China.

The Palace existed during the imperial days, and was the site where Sun Yat-Sen was sworn in as provisional president in 1912 and the site eventually became the headquarters of the national government. Due to various political factors, it took until 1947 for a constitution to be ratified and Chiang Kai-Shek was sworn in as the first proper president of the Republic of China. His administration only lasted 2 years before his government was forced to flee to Taiwan, where the Republic of China still exists today (and the capital on the mainland moved to Beijing...again).

I toured the grounds, including the actual President's office and auxiliary buildings including a bomb shelter and horse stable. It was pretty neat to see the principal government building from a time when China was a democracy, and certainly a much more uplifting visit than my morning activity.

By the time I was done with the Palace, it had gotten late in the afternoon and I had been walking all day so I decided to head back to the hostel for a while. I ended up going to dinner with a guy from Oregon I had met the previous day. We went to a restaurant called the Swede and Kraut recommended by Lonely Planet, where they had pizza specials on Tuesday nights. I think our waiter forgot about us because we waited for nearly an hour, and when I inquired about our food he looked surprised and came back with it immediately. It was pretty good for ham pizza in China.

My train out of town left on Wednesday, so I stayed around the hostel until it was time to go to the train station. Next: Wuhan.

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