Li Xiuying: survivor and witness

Portraits of massacre survivors displayed at the Memorial Hall in Nanjing. Li Xiuying was among the survivors who told their stories publicly for decades. Photo: Samudes (Wikimedia user), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · The Rape of Nanking, 1937–1938

Li Xiuying: Survivor and Witness

She fought back, survived 37 bayonet wounds, and spent nearly seventy years telling what happened, in Nanjing, to researchers and in a Japanese court.

Content note. This page describes an attempted rape and a violent assault on a pregnant woman, as she herself described it in public testimony. It contains one blurred still from John Magee’s film showing her wounds. Click the image to reveal it.

Most of the women who were raped in Nanjing in the winter of 1937–38 are known only as entries in the Safety Zone committee’s case lists, in the diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang, and in the estimate of the Tokyo tribunal that about 20,000 cases occurred in the city in the first month of the occupation. Many did not survive. Of those who did, very few ever spoke publicly about what had been done to them. Li Xiuying was one who did, and she did so for most of her long life.

Her story rests on two kinds of evidence. There is John Magee’s film, shot at the University Hospital in December 1937 or January 1938, with his note describing a young pregnant woman stabbed many times while resisting. And there is her own testimony, given over decades to researchers, to Iris Chang and to journalists, and tested in a Japanese court when a writer accused her of being a fraud.

This page tells her story in the terms she used in public, without adding detail she did not give. It is written in her memory and in that of the women who could not speak. The wider history is told in Chapter 4; the denial campaign she faced is described in Chapter 9.

December 1937

Li Xiuying was 18 or 19 years old in December 1937 and about seven months pregnant. Her account, as retold by her daughter to the Global Times and reported by China Daily, is the basis for what follows. When the city fell she was hiding with several other women in the basement of the Wutaishan primary school. On 19 December, by her account, three Japanese soldiers came to the basement to take women. She fought back. The soldiers stabbed her with their bayonets again and again; the last blow, to her abdomen, brought her down. She was left for dead.

She lay there for hours. Someone noticed that she was still breathing, with blood bubbling at her mouth. Her father, afraid of drawing the soldiers’ attention, waited until evening before she was carried to the University Hospital. The doctors there stitched 37 bayonet wounds. That night, unconscious, she lost the child she was carrying.

In Magee’s film

At the hospital she was filmed by John Magee, the Episcopal priest who was recording the victims of the occupation with a 16 mm camera. His note for the sequence describes a 19-year-old refugee, six and a half months pregnant, who had been stabbed many times while resisting rape. The film was smuggled out of Nanjing by George Fitch in January 1938, shown in Shanghai, Berlin and the United States, and is now held at the Memorial Hall and the Yale Divinity Library. It is one of the few cases in which a contemporary image, a contemporary written note and a survivor’s later testimony can all be matched.

The surgeon who led the hospital through those weeks, Robert Wilson, recorded case after case like hers in letters to his family; on 15 December he had written that “The slaughter of civilians is appalling.” The University Hospital’s records and the letters of Wilson and the hospital administrator James McCallum are the contemporary setting for her account, even where they do not name her.

Scars

She recovered slowly. The wounds to her face left deep scars, and for years, China Daily reported, looking in a mirror was an ordeal for her. Speaking to Iris Chang in the mid-1990s, she said: “Now, after 58 years, the wrinkles have covered the scars.” She later had children; her daughter, Lu Qi, has spoken publicly about her mother since her death.

Over the following decades she told her story many times. Her message is preserved on a panel at the Memorial Hall in Chinese, English and Japanese: “Remember history, but not with hatred.”

The libel case

A Japanese writer, Matsumura Toshio, published a book disputing the massacre in which he claimed that Li Xiuying’s testimony was false. Rather than ignore it, she sued him for defamation in Japan. The Japanese courts found in her favour. One report dates the judgment that settled the case to 10 April 2003; the legal news service Jurist put her award against Matsumura at the equivalent of about US$12,900. The sources checked for this page do not agree on which court gave which judgment, and the exact amount in yen is not confirmed here.

The case mattered beyond the money. A Japanese court had examined her account against the denial literature’s claims and found the claims defamatory. A few years later another survivor, Xia Shuqin, whose family was killed on 13 December 1937, won judgments in China in 2006, against Higashinakano Shūdō and Matsumura, and in Japan in 2009, against Higashinakano and his publisher. Together the cases made a point that historians had long made: survivor testimony that is consistent over decades and corroborated by contemporary records cannot simply be waved away.

Remember history, but not with hatred.

— Li Xiuying, as quoted on a panel at the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre

Her death, and the last survivors

Li Xiuying died in 2004, aged 86, by her daughter’s account. The generation of survivors has almost gone. In December 2025 China’s state media reported 24 registered survivors still living; by 3 January 2026, after the death of Xu Deming at 96, the number was 22. Their testimony survives in the Memorial Hall’s archives and in the 30 Nanjing testimonies recorded with the USC Shoah Foundation between 2012 and 2017 for its Visual History Archive.