The Chinese government organized the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing massacre on Thursday. The event included several exhibitions and the reopening of an expanded Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall dedicated to the hundreds of thousands of victims.

Sirens wailed at the hall to remind the people of the victims and marked the official commemoration of the massacre. The memorial hall is located on the site of a pit where approximately 10,000 bodies were discovered.

Ye Zhaoyan's, the writer who described the massacre in his well-known novel "Nanjing 1937", didn’t attend the ceremony held at the memorial hall. The third-generation author and lifelong Nanjing resident said to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that he doesn’t like “to attend these large-scale activities." He added that he prefers that the people read his novel which presents a love story that ends with the beginning of the Japanese invasion of Nanjing.

Thousands of Chinese people gathered at the Memorial Hall and when the sirens wailed they observed a moment of silence for those killed by the Japanese during their invasion and then occupation of the city. The invasion of the eastern Chinese began on December 13, 1937.

Attending the ceremony were also some who survived the terrible massacre that took place in Nanjing, among them was the 75-year-old Shi Xiuqin.

"When the Japanese soldiers came, it was horrible. I saw them use knives to slit people open from head to waist," she said for the AFP.

The Japanese Empire invaded Nanjing after it took control of much of northeastern China in 1931. After occupying Beijing and nearby Tianjin by the end of July 1937, the Japanese troops moved south to attack Shanghai and Nanjing. Nanjing had been capital of China for 10 years and over that period its population had swelled to 950,000.

In December 1937 and January 1938, the troops of the Japanese Empire invaded the town and "six weeks of destruction, pillage, rape and slaughter" followed, state media said this week. During the occupation of Nanjing, the Japanese army committed numerous atrocities, such as rape, looting, arson and the execution of prisoners of war and civilians.

The extent of the atrocities was long debated with numbers ranging from some Japanese claims of several hundred, to the Chinese claim of a non-combatant death toll of 300,000.
Other nations usually believe the death toll to be somewhere between 150,000 – 300,000. This figure was first promulgated in January of 1938 by Harold Timperly, a journalist in China during the Japanese invasion, based on reports from contemporary eyewitnesses.