The Flowers of War

During the fall of Nanjing, an American mortician posing as a priest takes refuge in a besieged cathedral alongside a group of schoolgirls and a band of courtesans fleeing the Japanese army. As the atrocities outside intensify, he is drawn into protecting the group at great personal risk.

The film is set amid the Nanjing Massacre of December 1937, when Japanese forces occupying the Chinese capital killed tens of thousands of civilians and disarmed soldiers. Foreign nationals in the city, including members of the Nanking Safety Zone committee, sheltered thousands of Chinese civilians during the massacre.

The central characters and cathedral siege are fictional, based on a novel, though they draw loosely on real accounts of foreigners sheltering civilians in Nanjing.

After the fall of Shanghai, Japanese forces advanced up the Yangtze and captured the Chinese capital, following it with weeks of mass killing and rape of civilians and disarmed soldiers.

Chinese defences collapsed on 12–13 December 1937. A small group of Western residents established the Nanjing Safety Zone, which sheltered a substantial part of the remaining civilian population. Estimates of the dead vary widely between Chinese, Japanese and Western scholarship.

Directed by Zhang Yimou

Cast: Christian Bale, Ni Ni, Zhang Xinyi, Tong Dawei

Positioned at December 1937 within the Second Sino-Japanese War phase of the war, as part of the Nanjing Campaign. This is entry 7 of 150 in the chronological archive.

• Nanjing Massacre
• Nanking Safety Zone
• civilian rescue
• Japanese occupation

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  City of Life and Death

  December 1937 – January 1938

• 

  John Rabe

  November 1937 – February 1938

• 

  The Eight Hundred

  26 October – 1 November 1937

• 

  Devils on the Doorstep

  1944–1945

• 

  The Children of Huang Shi

  1937–1945

• 

  The King's Speech

  1925–1939