Nanking Road [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION THE town which is the scene of the events here re- ported exists no longer; its face has been altered, as so often before. There has been fighting in its streets on innumerable occasions, but never fighting so desperate as in the late summer and early autumn of 1937. For eighty-eight days this town was besieged, shelled and bombed. Hundreds of thousands died, and the smell of charred human flesh for long hung in thick clouds above it. One of the first bombs to be dropped from the air hit the Shanghai Hotel, the large, new building erected four years before, soon after the fighting of 1932. A colonnaded build- ing of eighteen stories, surmounted by its celebrated roof garden, it stood in Nanking Road half-way between the Bund and the English race-course. The bomb did considerable damage. All the windows were shattered, and a gaping hole in the façade tore open several rooms, exposing their interior to view. The Japanese maintained that the bomb was dropped by Chinese fliers, whereas the Chinese insisted that the bomb was Japanese. The foreign correspondents inclined to the view that this bomb was meant for the Japanese warships on the Whang- poo River but had been badly aimed by a Chinese airman. Protests were made and apologies were published, for al- though the Chinese quarters had been shelled to bits from