Nanking’s John Rabe House
Posted: March 6th, 2011 | 1 Comment »
In Nanking the other week I took some free time to revisit the old John Rabe house. Hopefully for readers of this blog I don’t need to spell out who Rabe was (and anyway here’s his Wikipedia page). So I’ll just stick a few photos up here. The house itself is in good condition as is the former early Siemens office adjacent to it. It’s nice that Rabe’s old air raid shelter is still there. However, unless I’m mistaken the small German school that Rabe founded and that lies behind the Rabe House has been converted into the toilets block for the museum!! The exhibits are OK though the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall is better I think. The Rabe house has far too many pictures of obscure and now long forgotten 1970s and 1980s German politicians traipsing through the place with wide lapels, tinted Foster Grants and Cuban heels – these were not kind decades to West German fashion and even less so for the poor old GDR! Still, at least it hasn’t been bulldozed.
The Rabe House – about the best preserved Nanking Decade property in the city
Down the side and behind the Rabe House is the small German school building – now the bogs!
Rabe’s old air raid shelter – i suspect the crazy paving is new – it’s blocked of so you can get down into it unfortunately
The early and very small Siemens Nanking office – they had others that were a bit grander
Rabe and his Chinese manager outside the Siemens office sometime in the 1930s
These are some of the best preserved buildings from that era. I have done research on Rabe, and several of the other foreigners that stayed behind to work in the safety zone. You can read a little more about that here, including a map of other historic buildings from that era that were known to house refugees. (http://seeingredinchina.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/remembering-the-rape-of-nanking/)