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A major work on modern Chinese history, this book provides vivid and accurate documentation of one of Japan's worst aggressions against China.

I should begin by summarizing the historical value of the work. Rather than a compilation using cut-and-paste technique, it is a solid and original study that maintains all the important standards of modern historiography: First, the work draws its main narrative from primary sources, including archives in Germany, Japan, and the United States, as well as journalistic reports, records of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and the recollections of survivors of the Nanking massacre; second, it incorporates a large number of references from other works about the Rape of Nanking; third, the skill of the authors and editors is reflected in two major areas:

• significant topics have been condensed from an ocean of historical materials into eight in-depth chapters, making this complex historical tragedy easily comprehended by readers;

• the entire narrative is built on solid evidence that is treated objectively, and rendered in fluent English and Chinese. The authors and editors have broken new ground in many areas. Through careful calculation of time and duration, they determine that Iwane Matsui was wrongly accused of being the Butcher of Nanking and sentenced to death by hanging. The real criminal, they demonstrate, was Prince Asaka, Emperor Hirohito's uncle. In another crucial area, where the number of persons killed in Nanking has been controversial for half a century, this work puts an end to the debate: to prove that the number was no less than 369,366, for the first time burial records and Nanking census figures from before and after the massacre are brought to bear on this controversy.

The significance of these two points cannot be overestimated in the study of the history of Japanese aggression. With its more than 400 valuable historical photographs, The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs also constitutes an important reference for future historians on this subject.

FOR NEARLY A HUNDRED YEARS, China's history has been a history of frustration and suffering from both internal turmoil created by the Chinese themselves and external aggressions launched by foreign powers. These disasters from within and without were inextricably linked as cause and result -- the chicken and the egg of the familiar conundrum. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the Japanese aggressions against China played a decisive role in changing China's destiny.

As early as the 1890s, in the initial period of China's modernization, Japan mounted its first invasion „ the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, which completely destroyed the foundation of China's development as a modern society.

In the 1930s, at a crucial time when China had started once again to industrialize, Japan, driven by its militarism, launched a full-scale invasion - the "Manchuria Incident" in 1931, followed by the "Marco Polo Incident" in 1937, followed by all-out war and occupation. Once again, China lost its opportunity to transform itself into a modern and democratic society.

For more than fifty years after the war, the Japanese public, and especially its intellectuals, have been expressing regret and remorse for what their government did to China during the war. But a coalition of conservative parties, bureaucrats, and business leaders has lacked the courage to admit Japanese war crimes, or to publicly apologize for Japan's wrongdoing against her neighbors.

"Japan must apologize for its aggression and offer compensation," wrote Nobel Literature Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe in a New York Times Magazine article titled "Denying History Disables Japan" (July 2, 1995). "Without that rehabilitation we shall never be able to eradicate the ambivalence in our attitude toward our neighbors." Here Oe fathoms a profound point.

The Chinese have a tendency to forget their past. May this book awaken their painful memories, and also arouse the collective conscience and historical memory of the citizens of Japan.