Memorial Hall to the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre

The Memorial Hall is located in the southwestern corner of Nanjing known as Jiangdongmen, once an execution grounds and mass burial places of the cruel holocaust. Covering an area of about 300,000 square meters with a floor space of 5,000 square meters, the hall was built in 1985 and was enlarged and renovated in 1995. The construction was fashioned out of gray marble, which reveals an atmosphere of magnificent and solemn. Combined with the historical data, cultural relics, architecture, sculpture, videos, the massacre was displayed vividly in this hall.

The memorial consists of three major parts: outdoor exhibits, sheltered skeletal remains of victims and historical material displaying.

Outdoor exhibits

The out door exhibits consists of three parts, including the mourning square, memorial square and the graveyard square. In the mourning square, there are a cross-shaped stele inscribed with the date that the Nanjing massacre happened, an abstract sculpture of the 300,000 victims, a large scale group sculpture depicting the disaster of the ancient city of Nanjing and the peace dove sculpture. In the memorial square, there are luxuriantly green pine and cypress, a memorial stone wall, and a tablet carved with “Victims 300,000” in three languages (Chinese, English and Japanese). In the graveyard square, there are three groups of gray carved reliefs and 17 small size tablets, on some of which are the record of the main sites of the massacre and some historical facts.

Skeletal remains

A hall shaped like a coffin is to shelter some of the skeletal remains of massacre victim excavated from the “pits of thousands of bodies”.

Historical material exhibition

The historical material exhibition museum lies half buried in the ground like a colossal tomb and contains an immense collection of pictures, objects, charts, and photographs.

Experience is the best teacher. The Memorial Hall to the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre has become an important site for international communities to pray for PEACE as well as a site for historical and cultural exchanges. It is also a “national demonstrative educational base for patriotism” and a “national educational base for students”.