13. Cemetery square

Now, we walk up the steps along the Copperplate Road and see the black characters of "Victims · 300,000" engraved in Chinese, English and Japanese characters on the wall, highlighting the theme of the memorial hall. Here is the cemetery square, a monumental cemetery building style. The cemetery square is paved with cobblestones, and the grass is not growing, symbolizing the numerous white bones, symbolizing death; The green lawns on both sides and the evergreen trees outside the walls symbolize vitality and the spirit of resistance. Life and death form a strong contrast here, and the themes of life and death are displayed between the lines. The few dead trees represent that one-third of the buildings in Nanjing were burned down and embellish the miserable atmosphere. On both sides, there are 17 small commemorative stone tablets of different shapes, such as Torpedo Camp, Zhongshan Pier and Grass Shoe Gorge, which are engraved with the inscriptions of the mass burial places of compatriots killed in the Nanjing Massacre. The city's 17 memorial sites for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre are on display here. On the left side, on the wall of the ruined walls is a group of more than 20 bronze sculptures composed of a "relief wall", which is divided into four groups "catastrophe", "Slaughter", "Capsize", "Libation".With a length of 70 meters and a height of 2.6 meters, it was created by Professor Qian Dajing of Nanjing University of the Arts. Here, the artistic technique of stone relief is used to reproduce the brutal acts of burning, killing and pillaging of the invading Japanese army.

In the square stands a 4-meter-high sculpture, made of granite, called "Mother's Call."It shows the image of a Chinese mother in the 1930s. The art is based on a moving picture of the Nanjing Massacre secretly shot by John Magee, an American missionary who stayed in Nanjing to protect the victims. In the picture, there is a prototype of a mother who walks around looking for her relatives with a bamboo stick. Her left hand was stretched out as if she were looking for and calling for her lost loved ones, and her right hand was clenched to show her anger. The original 43-meter-long and 3.5-meter-high granite stone wall is called the List Wall of compatriots in distress, and the people call it the "Wailing Wall".After the expansion in 2007, 2011, 2013 and 2019, the total length of the "Wailing Wall" has reached 69.5 meters, and it is engraved with the list of 10,655 Nanjing Massacre victims,