The next day I awoke to find that I was still in Nanjing, and ninja spies hadn’t decapitated me while I slept. This was good because it meant I could go out and spend the day being a tourist as I had originally planned.

The first order of business was to check out an old republican district that was just down the street from the hotel. The pre-WW2 area was mostly walled off, with nice quiet tree lined streets. It reminded me of the Badaguan area in Qingdao, or perhaps an undeveloped version of the French Concession in Shanghai. From what I could tell by peeking into a few of the compounds, the houses had been chopped up to fit way more tenants than was originally designed, like most other housing was during the 60s. Regardless, the buildings looked like they were kept in reasonably good condition and if I were to live in Nanjing, I would pick here.

Next up, was the main event of our stay in Nanjing: The Memorial Hall for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Forces of Aggression. As most of you know, and some of you may not, Nanjing was the site of some horrible shit back during the early stages of Second World War. Relative to other Chinese museums and monuments, the quality of this particular complex stands out as top class, as it should in order to respectfully memorialize the events of such a tragedy.

This one quote by John Rabe caught my eye. I was surprised it was shown so prominently despite the fact it displays the Judeo-Christian concept of forgiveness, which doesn’t feature so much in Eastern Asian cultures. Just ask most Chinese people you meet what they think of Japanese people, and you will quickly see that this quote doesn’t resonate.

I only had two beefs that manifested themselves once we were at the end of the tour through the main building. After you finish the complete story of the Massacre, you go up a set of stairs to the way out. For a short distance here, there is another exhibit on China’s various losses and humiliations at the hands of foreign forces. Talk about playing the victim card. The massacre is one thing, a bunch of unrelated historical events is another, and when you add them onto the main event it comes across as a real sleazy attempt at propaganda. To my relief, it looked like most people were skipping through this section and the small gift shop near the exit door. The gift shop was my other beef. Therein lied a whole smack of Mao memorabilia that can only been one of the sickest forms of hypocrisy I’ve seen to date.

Despite these two little things, it was still a worthwhile place to check out. Just like my old history teacher always said, “If you don’t learn from History, you’re bound to repeat it… in my class next year SUCKAS!!”

With enough depression for one day, the next stop was a little more cheery, the Nanjing City Wall. And we all know, China loves it some walls. It was relatively well preserved, and you could walk around through it. There was some kind of Lantern Festival going on, which demanded a large probably not worth it entrance fee, so instead we skipped that and wandered around the peaceful old Chinese style neighborhoods that surrounded it.

With little time left in the day, we scurried off to a few more places, like the ruins of the Ming Dynasty capital, and good old Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum. Dr. Sun (commonly known as Zhongshan around these parts), lead the rebel uprising that eventually defeated Darth Vader, the Galactic Empire and the formed of the New Republic. So as you can imagine, he’s a pretty popular guy. Just as we made our way to the gates, we found out they were closed for the day. No matter, all the tourists had vanished into the ether from whence they came, so I could snap a few decent pictures without their endemic presence.

Since everything was closed and it was getting dark, we returned to the hotel post-haste so we could avoid being attacked by ghouls. After realizing that the restaurant we wanted to eat at was located in a building that was now a pile of rubble, we settled for some strange type hot pot I’ve never had before. It was good, but not too good, and certainly not appetizing enough to feast your eyes on. Actually it looked like a pile of garbage served in a big bowl. As far as I know, I didn’t contract any strange diseases from it, which was also a good thing, because the next day we were headed to Soochow, the homeless man’s Venice.

Filed under: tourist shit