For more than 250 years, An Account of Ten Days at Yangzhou was suppressed in China by the Manchu emperors, and the Yangzhou Massacre, along with numerous other atrocities during the Manchu Conquest, was forgotten. It wasn’t until the decade before the Revolution of 1911 that copies of the book were brought back from Japan and republished in China. The text played a small, but important, role in the fall of the Qing and the end of Imperial rule in China. I translated the excerpts used in this story. Due to the long suppression, which continues to some degree to this day, the true number of
...more
