Historical Documents on the Nanjing Massacre, Vol. 14: Minnie Vautrin's Diary

The Collection of Historical Materials on the Nanjing Massacre is a major scholarly undertaking. Collecting and organizing historical materials, as well as translating, editing, and publishing documents in English, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian, and other languages, is an extremely complex and arduous task. As a result, the volumes can only be published in stages over time. Similar historical materials have sometimes had to be published in separate volumes at different times, and we ask readers for their understanding. We hope this collection will provide historians and readers at home and abroad with as much historical material as possible, rich and comprehensive in content. However, because the sources are diverse, the accounts include firsthand experiences and eyewitness testimony from perpetrators, victims, and third parties, as well as memoirs, archival documents, newspaper and periodical materials, and more. These accounts of the Nanjing Massacre do not always agree. Some even contradict one another because of the writers' positions, perspectives, or limited understanding, and some contain errors or inaccurate opinions. This is hardly surprising. Accounts of a catastrophe so shocking to the world could never be entirely consistent. Preserving historical materials in their original form is a professional duty and scholarly standard for historians. Therefore, we have reproduced all materials exactly as they appeared, without any changes, and made them available to historical researchers, who can examine and analyze them in their work and reach sound conclusions consistent with historical facts.