【明報專訊】On 17th January 1937, 80 years ago, the massacres, rapes and pillage were still wreaking havoc on Nanking, then the abandoned capital of the Republic of China. For reminding the world the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Army, Iris Chang's (1968-2004) best-selling monograph, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), draws unimpeachable evidence from eyewitness reports, Japanese diaries and confessions, archival documents, and from war-crime trial transcripts. Above all, the unforgiving Chang managed to unearth the diaries of John Rabe (1882-1950), then the leader of the Nazi Party in the city, which compellingly corroborated those accounts from different sources.