ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the history, historiography and commemoration of the Lüshun (Port Arthur) massacre, an attack on Chinese civilians by the Japanese military in 1894 during the First Sino-Japanese War that left thousands dead. This understudied massacre, overshadowed by the atrocity in Nanjing decades later, was marked by conflicting contemporary news reports about the scale of the attack, and its history was subsequently buried for decades after Japan’s occupation of Northeast China. Postwar geopolitics kept the event and its victims in the dark until the early 1990s when it was rediscovered by local Chinese historical and archeological teams who uncovered the bodies of numerous victims. The port city of Lüshun is dotted with memorial sites of trauma and war commemoration, ranging from the massacre site to battlefield memorials from the Russo-Japanese War to the infamous prison run by Russian and Japanese imperial powers, which is now a museum. An examination of the history of this atrocity and its rediscovery during a period of rising nationalism and the influx of Japanese tourists and capital in the region make it an important comparative case that sheds light on the process of how a massacre disappears and reappears following shifts in geopolitics and the historical narratives that often serve such shifts.
