英语文摘:China extends "wailing wall" to engrave more names of Nanjing Massacre victims

NANJING, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- China on Sunday started to extend a memorial wall to engrave more names of those massacred by Japanese aggressors more than 70 years ago in Nanjing.

After extension, the "wailing wall", a part of the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders, will have 10,324 names on it, curator Zhu Chengshan said.

The wall was engraved with 3,000 names when it was first built in 1995, and the list was expanded to more than 8,600 names in 2007 when the memorial reopened after a major repair and extension to mark the 70th anniversary of the massacre.

The original wall was 43 meters long and 3.5 meters high. The extension will lengthen the wall by 26.5 meters, with 1,655 more names added to it, according to Zhu.

Nanjing Massacre happened during World War II after Japanese troops occupied Nanjing, then capital of China, on Dec. 13, 1937. More than 300,000 Chinese were killed in the month-long atrocity.

To collect the names of the victims is an important but tough job in the research of the massacre, as it is hard to seek witnesses and related documents decades after the holocaust, said Zhu.