The Rapes: Sexual Violence and the Women of Ginling College

Minnie Vautrin with refugees at Ginling College, 1937–38. At its peak the campus sheltered about 10,000 women and children. Photo: Unknown photographer, Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre (collection), PD China via Wikimedia Commons.

The Rape of Nanking · Chapter 4 of 10

The Rapes

Sexual violence on a scale the Tokyo tribunal put at about 20,000 cases in the first month, and the women’s college where two teachers kept a gate, a diary and some 10,000 women and children through the winter of 1937–38.

13 December 1937 – spring 1938Ginling College · the Safety Zone · Lijixiang~27 min read

Content note. This chapter describes sexual violence, including against children and elderly women, and killings that followed it. It does so without graphic detail and names survivors only where they chose to testify in public. One archival image, of a wounded survivor in hospital, loads blurred; click to reveal it.

The English phrase “the Rape of Nanking” was coined for the whole catastrophe of the city’s occupation, but it was chosen because of one crime in particular. In the weeks after 13 December 1937, Japanese soldiers raped Chinese women and girls in Nanjing on a scale that the foreigners who stayed in the city could barely record, let alone stop. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) concluded in 1948 that “approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred within the city during the first month of the occupation.” Other estimates run from that figure to 80,000. Whatever the exact number, no other category of crime appears so often, day after day, in the diaries, letters and protest reports written inside the city that winter.

This chapter follows that record. It begins with the question of scale and the patterns that the Safety Zone committee documented. It then turns to Ginling College, the American-founded women’s college on Ninghai Road that became a refuge for women and children only, run by the American educator Minnie Vautrin and the Chinese dormitory director and nurse Tsen Shui-fang (Cheng Ruifang). Their two diaries, one in English and one in Chinese, are among the most important contemporary sources for the occupation. The chapter ends with what the army did next, the expansion of military “comfort stations,” and with the survivors who later testified, among them Li Xiuying.

A note on evidence. Three kinds of source are used here. The first is contemporary: Vautrin’s diary (published in full as Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing, ed. Suping Lu, 2008), Tsen’s diary (translated with Vautrin’s in The Undaunted Women of Nanking, 2010), the letters of the University Hospital staff, and the numbered case reports the International Committee sent to the Japanese embassy (printed in 1939 and reprinted in Timothy Brook’s Documents on the Rape of Nanking). The second is postwar testimony and trial record: the IMTFE judgment, Tsen’s written statement of 8 April 1946, and survivors’ later accounts. The third is the work of historians who reconstruct what the records cannot show directly, including totals. Each is labelled as it appears.

The Scale: How Many Women?

No one counted the rapes of Nanjing as they happened, and no count could have been complete. Victims who were killed afterwards could not report. Those who survived often told no one, then or later. The foreigners in the Safety Zone wrote down what was reported to them or what they saw, which was a fraction of the whole, concentrated inside the zone and in the camps they ran. Outside the zone, and in the villages beyond the walls, there was often no witness who could write in a language the outside world could read.

The figure used most often, and the anchor for this section, is the IMTFE’s. The tribunal’s judgment, read in November 1948, found that about 20,000 rapes occurred within the city in the first month. The tribunal reached that number from the testimony and affidavits of the Westerners who had stayed, the Safety Zone documents, and Chinese witnesses (IMTFE Judgment, ch. VIII). It is a postwar judicial estimate, not a tally, and it covers the city in the first month only. The violence continued well beyond that month and well beyond the walls. Iris Chang, in The Rape of Nanking (1997), gave a range of 20,000 to 80,000, and most scholarly discussion sits inside that span, with 20,000 the figure most often cited.

The contemporary documents do not supply a total, but they show why the larger numbers are plausible. The International Committee’s numbered case reports to the Japanese embassy, about 450 of them by early February 1938 according to standard accounts, include hundreds of individually described rapes, abductions and attempted abductions, almost all inside the zone where the committee could see. Smythe, the committee’s secretary, filed two protests a day for the first six weeks, the IMTFE noted. Vautrin, in a single camp, recorded abductions of a dozen or more women on a single night. The record is fragmentary by nature, and every author who worked from it, including the committee members themselves, said that what they wrote down was only part of what happened.

What the Safety Zone Records Show

Read together, the committee’s reports, the hospital letters and the two Ginling diaries describe a small number of patterns that recur from the first days. They are set out here because they are what the evidence documents most firmly; individual cases are left in the documents themselves.

The first is the search. Japanese units entered the Safety Zone from 14 December looking for Chinese soldiers who had shed their uniforms. The searches were real, and they led to the mass executions described in Chapter 3, but they also gave soldiers a reason to enter every compound, house and camp, day and night. Vautrin noted on 17 December that a party of soldiers demanded to search Ginling’s buildings ostensibly for soldiers; the diary makes clear that what they wanted was the young women (Lu, DEP 2009, pp. 21–22). The same pretext recurs in the committee’s reports for weeks.

The second is the night. The camps were most dangerous after dark, when small groups of soldiers, sometimes two or three, sometimes more, climbed walls or forced gates and took women from the buildings. The committee members and the Ginling staff organised night patrols and slept in the camps, and many entries in the diaries record a foreigner called out after midnight to a building where soldiers had been seen.

The third is abduction. Women and girls were taken from the camps, from houses inside and outside the zone, and from the streets, sometimes for hours and sometimes for days. Some came back; some did not. Vautrin’s entries for 16 and 17 December record girls taken from the language school and a dozen women taken from Ginling through a side gate.

The fourth is age. The tribunal found that “even girls of tender years and old women were raped in large numbers throughout the city.” The diaries agree. Vautrin recorded on 16 December that one of the girls seized at the gate “was but 12 years old,” and women arriving at Ginling described soldiers who took girls of 12 and women of 60 from their homes. Tsen recorded on 18 December the rapes of a woman over 60 and a woman in her forties.

The fifth is killing. The IMTFE stated that “many women were killed after the act and their bodies mutilated.” Women who resisted were beaten, stabbed or shot, and family members who tried to protect them were killed. Some of the most widely known cases of the massacre, including the family of the eight-year-old Xia Shuqin at Xinlukou No. 5 on 13 December and the stabbing of Li Xiuying, belong to this pattern.

Men were also sexually assaulted, and men were forced to take part in assaults on their own relatives. These cases appear in the contemporary documents and in Chang’s synthesis; they are noted here and not described further.

Approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred within the city during the first month of the occupation.

— Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, ch. VIII, November 1948 (text)

Ginling College: A Campus for Women

Ginling College (Jinling nüzi daxue) was a Christian women’s college founded in 1913 by several American mission boards. In the 1920s it moved to a new campus on Ninghai Road in the western part of the city, a set of palace-style buildings with curved tile roofs designed by the American architect Henry Murphy around a long lawn. Its president from 1928 was Wu Yi-fang, the first Chinese woman to lead the college. The campus is now the Suiyuan campus of Nanjing Normal University, and the buildings still stand.

Minnie Vautrin had taught there since 1916. Born in Secor, Illinois, in 1886, she paid her own way through the University of Illinois, graduated in 1912 and went to China for the United Christian Missionary Society. At Ginling she chaired the education department and served as acting president while the college’s founding president, Matilda Thurston, was raising money in the United States (Yale Divinity Library). When most of the faculty and students evacuated west in the autumn of 1937, she stayed. Wu Yi-fang left for Wuchang on 2 December, leaving the campus to an emergency committee of Vautrin, Tsen Shui-fang and the Chinese staff member Francis Chen (Guo, Religions 2016).

Ginling lay inside the boundaries of the Safety Zone that the International Committee had drawn in late November (see Chapter 5). The committee assigned it to women and children. In its last days of peace the staff practised receiving refugees, with neighbourhood schoolchildren as ushers, and on 8 December the first families arrived, saying that Chinese troops had ordered them out of their homes outside the walls (Vautrin diary, 8 December). By 11 December the camp held 850 people.

Ten Thousand on a Campus Built for a Few Hundred

The city fell on 13 December, and the women came. Vautrin later wrote that at their peak load there “must have had ten thousand on the campus” (quoted in Lu, DEP 2009). They filled the dormitories, classrooms, the science building, the attics, the covered walkways and the verandahs. Older women were urged to go home or to other camps so that the space could go to the young, who were in most danger; Vautrin and the staff stood at the gate and made the choice person by person.

The numbers in the two diaries do not agree day by day, and they should not be expected to. Thousands of people were arriving after dark, moving between buildings and leaving again, and no one had time to count. Tsen, who ran the dormitories, generally gives higher figures than Vautrin: four or five thousand on 14 December, seven or eight thousand on 16 December and over 9,000 on 18 December, against Vautrin’s more than 5,000 on 15 December and more than 6,000 on 20 December. Both agree that the peak, about 10,000, came around 22 December. Numbers fell slowly in January as some women went home, then rose again when the Japanese authorities ordered the other camps closed on 4 February 1938 and Ginling became the last refuge for many. A census in mid-March counted 3,310 residents, and about 900 remained at the end of May.

Space was found where it could be. On 17 December, with the campus already overflowing, Vautrin arranged for about 1,000 women to move to a dormitory of the University of Nanking a few hundred metres away, and kept Ginling’s own gate open; more than 4,000 further refugees came in over the following days (Guo, Religions 2016). The university camps, run by Searle Bates, Charles Riggs and their Chinese colleagues, suffered the same night raids.

Feeding them was its own crisis. A Red Cross rice kitchen on the campus sold rice gruel for a few coppers a bowl to those who could pay and gave it free to the destitute, who were identified and given a red tag; on 22 December Vautrin recorded rice being distributed to registered refugees with red tags. The International Committee’s records show Ginling drawing twelve bags of rice a day. There was never enough; on 21 December Vautrin wrote that “we never have enough rice for them.” Tsen ran a clinic, delivered babies, nursed the sick and recorded deaths. In March 1938 she was giving milk to 34 babies and cod liver oil to 240 children under twelve, and the camp later organised the vaccination of some 2,000 refugees (Lu, DEP 2009; Guo, Religions 2016).

Six Weeks at the Gate: The Diaries, Day by Day

Vautrin wrote her diary most evenings, often late at night and exhausted; on 15 December she wrote that it was “so difficult to keep track of the days.” Tsen began hers at the same time and kept it hidden from the soldiers. The calendar below is built only from entries that are quoted or summarised in published editions and studies of the two diaries. Short quotations are verbatim from those publications; everything else is paraphrase.

17 December: “Never Shall I Forget That Scene”

The night of 17 December was the one Vautrin returned to most often. In the evening a group of soldiers came to the gate demanding to search the campus. When she refused to unlock a door they slapped her (her own words: “He then slapped me on the face”). The staff, Vautrin, Tsen and the missionary Mary Twinem were held at the front gate, some forced to kneel, while an officer questioned them. When the soldiers finally left, they had taken twelve women out through a side gate. Vautrin wrote that she would never forget the scene of the women being led past them in the dark (Lu, DEP 2009, pp. 21–22; Guo, Religions 2016). Tsen’s diary for the same night counts eleven girls taken. Fitch, Smythe and Mills arrived during the confrontation, too late to stop it.

The episode is a precise illustration of how the occupation worked at ground level. A search for soldiers was the stated reason; the result was abduction. The foreigners’ presence and their flags slowed the soldiers but did not stop them. Japanese officers were present and did nothing to restrain the men. And both diarists recorded it on the same night, independently, in two languages, which is why historians can reconstruct it with some confidence.

24 December: The Demand for “Prostitutes”

On 22 December Tsen noted in her diary that the Japanese were demanding a registration of the refugees. The army’s registration of Nanjing’s population, which issued identity papers to about 160,000 people between late December and early January (Askew, 2001), was meant to separate civilians from former soldiers. In the men’s camps it led to more executions, as men who answered a promise of work or leniency by admitting past army service were taken away (see Chapter 3). At Ginling, two days later, Japanese officers brought a different demand.

On 24 December, Christmas Eve, a group of Japanese officers including a senior military adviser came to Vautrin’s office and asked to be allowed to select 100 prostitutes from the refugees. Their stated reason was to open a licensed house for soldiers so that the troops would stop molesting “decent” women. Vautrin, who had spent ten days watching soldiers take women at will, agreed on the condition that no other women would be taken. The selection was made in her office, with the adviser present. Twenty-one women were taken. Vautrin recorded that the officers wanted the other 79 and that “they will not do so if it is in my power to prevent it” (Vautrin diary, 24 December 1937, as quoted in Guo, Religions 2016).

The diaries do not record what happened to the 21 women afterwards, and no later source examined for this chapter identifies them. Their fate is unknown. What the episode shows is clearer: within eleven days of the city’s fall, Japanese officers in Nanjing were trying to solve the problem of their own soldiers’ mass rape by procuring women for them, and they framed it in exactly the terms the army would use to justify the comfort-station system (below).

Proclamations, Guards and the Military Police

Vautrin’s main weapon was paper. From 18 December to 13 January she went again and again to the Japanese embassy to ask for written notices forbidding soldiers to enter the campus, and for military police (kempeitai) to guard it. She posted the proclamations on the gates and carried a letter from the embassy, and one of the two foreign women on campus always stayed behind to hold it. On 19 December her presence and the embassy letter were enough to make soldiers leave the room where she found one of them raping a girl. Often, though, the soldiers tore the notices down, and the proclamations of one day were ignored the next (Yale Divinity Library; Guo, Religions 2016).

The embassy’s diplomats were sympathetic in private and largely powerless in practice. They answered to the Foreign Ministry, not the army, and the city was under military control. Tsen recorded on 18 December that there were only 17 military police for all of Nanjing, a city with tens of thousands of Japanese troops. When guards did come, they were part of the problem. On the evening of 20 December about 25 soldiers arrived to guard the campus; Vautrin recorded that two women were raped that night by the guards themselves, and Tsen recorded that military police raped girls in one of the buildings. By 22 and 23 December Tsen recorded fewer visits and, at last, a night with no soldiers at all.

The pattern was not unique to Ginling. The Safety Zone committee’s letters to the embassy, written mostly by Lewis Smythe, asked repeatedly for military police at each camp and recorded that the policing that came was too little, too late and sometimes itself predatory. The committee’s work is the subject of Chapter 5.

Tsen Shui-fang: The Chinese Diarist at Ginling

Most of what English-language readers know about Ginling comes from Vautrin, but she was not alone and was not the only witness. Tsen Shui-fang (Cheng Ruifang, née Yue, 1875–1969) was 62 in December 1937. Born in Wuchang, she trained as a nurse, ran a hospital and later the dormitories of a girls’ school in Wuchang, and in 1924 came to Ginling as director of dormitories and college nurse. When the college evacuated she stayed, and she was the only nurse on the campus through the occupation.

Her diary, kept in Chinese and hidden from the soldiers, is regarded as the first known day-by-day account of the massacre by a Chinese resident. It is blunter than Vautrin’s. Where Vautrin still hoped that appeals to the embassy would work, Tsen did not. On 17 December she asked why the Chinese people had to suffer like this; on 21 December she wrote, of trusting Japanese promises, “You should not forget that we are their enemies” (Facing History; Hu and Zhang, 2010). She was also the camp’s practical centre: she assigned rooms, treated the sick, delivered babies and kept the record of the dying. The original diary is held at the Second Historical Archives of China in Nanjing and was among the documents inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register in 2015.

On 8 April 1946, she gave a written statement on Ginling to the prosecution of the Tokyo tribunal, one of the Chinese statements gathered in Nanjing that spring (Statement of Shui Fang Tsen, UVA IMTFE collection). She remained at Ginling until the Japanese army took over the campus in June 1942, helped reclaim it after the war, and died in Wuchang in 1969, aged 94.

After the Assaults: Pregnancy, Disease and Silence

The consequences of the rapes outlasted the occupation’s worst weeks, but they are the part of the story the contemporary record captures least. The diaries record individual cases: on 23 December Tsen noted a pregnant girl brought into the camp after an assault, and much of her work as a nurse was with pregnant women, injured women and newborns. The University Hospital, where Dr. Robert Wilson was for weeks the only surgeon operating, treated women with stab and gunshot wounds sustained in attacks; Wilson’s letters, now printed in Brook’s Documents, are among the most precise contemporary accounts of injuries.

Beyond that, historians must reconstruct. Iris Chang, drawing on missionary accounts and later Chinese sources, wrote of unwanted pregnancies, abortions, infanticide and suicides in the months that followed, and of venereal disease spread by the assaults. These outcomes cannot be quantified from the surviving records, and no reliable figure exists for any of them. What the contemporary records do show is that the hospital and the camp clinics were overwhelmed, and the later record shows that the stigma attached to rape kept most survivors silent for the rest of their lives.

The danger did not end with the first six weeks. Vautrin’s diary for 1 February 1938, as the authorities pressed refugees to go home, records a woman of 39 and a woman of 57 raped in their own homes soon after leaving the camp. On 8 March reports of soldiers searching houses for young women brought 200 to 300 women and girls back to the campus, and on 15 March she recorded the case of a 48-year-old woman and her 76-year-old mother, both raped, writing that the story was “vastly beyond heartless belief.” On 4 April, after two more women were assaulted within hours of leaving, she resolved never again to press women to leave (Guo, Religions 2016; Lu, DEP 2009).

Silence is part of the record too. In the decades after the war only a handful of women who had been raped or had resisted rape in Nanjing testified in public. Survivor testimony gathered in China from the 1980s, and by the USC Shoah Foundation from 2012, includes many accounts of killings and of violence against family members; only a few women, Li Xiuying the best known, chose to describe in public what had been done to themselves. The counts that matter most in this chapter, therefore, rest heavily on what the foreigners wrote down, and the foreigners were the first to say how incomplete that was.

Vautrin herself carried the weight for another two years. She ran the camp until it closed at the end of May 1938, then schools and work programmes for widows and girls; she traced missing men; she recorded more assaults on women who had gone home. Her last diary entry, on 14 April 1940, describes exhaustion. Two weeks later she broke down, and a colleague accompanied her back to the United States. She died by suicide in Indianapolis on 14 May 1941, a year to the day after leaving Nanjing (Yale Divinity Library).

From Mass Rape to the “Comfort Station” System

The Japanese army had operated military brothels on a small scale before 1937, but the Nanjing campaign marked a turning point. The historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki, working from the field diary of Iinuma Mamoru, chief of staff of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force, has shown that on 11 December 1937, two days before the city fell, Iinuma recorded receiving documents from the Central China Area Army on the establishment of comfort facilities, which he would oversee (Yoshimi, as summarised in his testimony for the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal). The rationale stated in army documents of the period, such as a North China Area Army notice on the same subject, was to prevent the rape of local women by soldiers; historians add the army’s concern with venereal disease and with the hostility that rape provoked in occupied areas.

The episode at Ginling on 24 December fits this explanation exactly. So does the outcome. The system that grew from it did not end sexual violence in occupied China; it institutionalised it. Women from Korea, then a Japanese colony, from China, Taiwan, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and elsewhere were recruited by deception or force and held in military brothels for years. Researchers have identified more than 40 comfort stations in Nanjing alone during the occupation, most now demolished (Jing Shenghong, as reported by Worldcrunch).

The largest surviving site is at Lijixiang, a lane in the southern part of the old city, where a group of two-storey brick buildings covering about 4,800 square metres housed several comfort stations, one mainly of Korean women, another mainly of Chinese women. In November 2003 Pak Yong-sim, a Korean former comfort woman then aged 82, came to Nanjing and identified one of the buildings as the place where she had been held. She had been abducted in August 1939, aged 17, and was kept in Nanjing until 1943, when she was sent to the front in Yunnan (China Daily, 21 November 2003). The buildings were saved from demolition and are now a museum of the comfort-station system.

The comfort-women system became an international issue only in the 1990s, when Korean survivors began to testify publicly. In the United States, the House of Representatives passed House Resolution 121 on 30 July 2007, calling on the Japanese government to acknowledge and apologise for it. The link to Nanjing is not that the system began there, but that the army’s answer to the mass rape of a capital city was to organise the sexual exploitation of women rather than to discipline its men.

Li Xiuying and the Survivors Who Spoke

Of the women attacked in Nanjing, the one whose case is best documented across every kind of evidence is Li Xiuying (1918–2004). In December 1937 she was 19 and six and a half months pregnant, hiding with other refugees in the basement of a primary school in the Safety Zone. When soldiers came for the women she fought back, and was stabbed many times; later accounts usually give 37 wounds. The court record of her later lawsuit dates the attack to 19 December 1937. She was carried to the University Hospital for treatment, and she survived.

John Magee filmed her in the hospital ward with his 16 mm camera, and his caption to the reel describes a 19-year-old woman, six and a half months pregnant, wounded resisting rape. That footage, smuggled out of the city in January 1938 (see Chapter 7), is contemporary evidence; her own testimony, given for decades afterwards, is the later record that matches it.

In the late 1990s the Japanese author Matsumura Toshio published a book suggesting that her account was inconsistent and that she was not the woman in Magee’s film. In September 1999 she sued him and his publisher, Tendensha, for defamation in Tokyo. On 10 May 2002 the Tokyo District Court found for her and awarded 1.5 million yen (1.2 million yen in damages and 300,000 yen in legal costs), though it declined to order an apology; the Tokyo High Court upheld the judgment on 10 April 2003, and the Supreme Court rejected the defendants’ final appeal in January 2005. She had died in 2004, before the last ruling (support-network records of the case, in Japanese). The case of Xia Shuqin, who won judgments in 2006 and 2009 against writers who had questioned her account, is told in Chapter 9.

Li Xiuying’s words are now displayed at the Memorial Hall in Chinese, English and Japanese: remember history, but not with hatred. The phrase has become one of the hall’s most quoted, and it reflects how she chose to speak of what had been done to her.

What the Sources Disagree On