When the Japanese break through the city’s walls, most residents assume they will be treated well. Given Tang’s abandonment of the city, some even cheer the arrival of the Japanese troops. It doesn’t take long, however, for the people of Nanking to realize a massacre is at hand. From the moment they enter the city, Japanese soldiers begin to shoot individuals on sight, from small children to the elderly. Young men suspected of being Chinese soldiers are kidnapped, starved, dehydrated, then led in groups of a hundred to mass graves where they are subject to Japanese killing contests. Tang Shunsan, a local apprentice and a rare survivor of such a contest, recalls being led to a pit of 60 bodies where a group of Japanese soldiers break into pairs for a beheading competition. Shunsan only survives because when the man in front of him is beheaded, his body knocks Shunsan into the pit. After the contest ends, a soldier stays behind to bayonet the corpses in search of survivors. Shunsan endures five bayonet wounds without crying out.

Elsewhere, it seems as if the limits of the Japanese soldiers’ sadism knows no bounds. Men are nailed to boards and then run over by tanks.