Jinling Woodblock Carving and Printing Center

Like you can't tell a book by its cover, it's impossible to figure out that a rather nondescript courtyard house, tucked in a corner of Huaihai Road, contains 125,000 wooden blocks of Chinese characters used for printing Buddhist sutras. It is the largest in the world.

The center also houses an incredibly huge collection of ancient and rare Buddhist classics, including those translated by the monk Xuanzang (AD 602-664), who brought back seminal Buddhist texts from his journey to India during the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907).

The publications that rolled off the first private printing shop for Buddhist texts in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), run by Yang Renshan (1837-1911), form the foundation of this organization. Considering that Yang printed and distributed more than 1 million chapters of canonical texts - some lost during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) - it was a solid and plentiful collection to build on.

The block-makers are, surprisingly, rather young. Wang Kang, 19, has seven generations of carving history behind him. When we meet Wang, the undergraduate specializing in old texts restoration is painstakingly etching out the contours of traditional Chinese characters - quite literally proving himself to be a chip off the old block.

Patience is key. It takes a week to complete work on two sides of the board with 80 characters. "One needs two to three years to learn the basic, and about 10 more to perfect the skill," says Wu Yankou, director of the research unit of the center.

But Wang is ready to give what it takes. "It's a feeling of sheer joy to be able to complete an assignment with the required finesse," he says, working on an intricately carved image of Sakyamuni.

Nanjing Massacre Memorial

The first thing that strikes one about the Nanjing Massacre Memorial is the scale on which it has been conceived. The space spreads out over 180,000 square meters, including the "Pit of 10,000 Corpses".

The memorial is built on the very location in Jiangdongmen in southwest Nanjing where thousands of the more than 300,000 Chinese slaughtered by the Japanese army in December 1937 were dumped. It is an overpowering reminder of mass-scale mutilation.

A giant sculpture of a bewildered woman stands almost dwarfed by a vast sea of pebbles, their color and size giving the impression of skulls and bones. Sculpted hands reach out from a wall of blindfolded captives, carved in relief, waiting to be slaughtered. Real skeletons lie scattered in a tangled heap in the pit.

Gruesome images of sadistic torture perpetrated on women, who truly did not have anything to do with the war, except for being at the wrong place at the wrong moment, are displayed inside the exhibition hall. It is jarring. But that's the idea. Lest we forget.

The memorial hall is a surreal dark room, lit up intermittently by candles.

The flames multiply indeterminately as they reflect against the water streaming across the floor and the polished black walls, illuminating the verses inscribed on them.

These are fervent appeals to put an end to such acts of human brutality, silently screaming, "never again".

The road to this hall is paved by cast iron slabs, containing the footprints of holocaust survivors. In a corner stands a life-size bronze sculpture of Iris Chang, who documented the story of the holocaust in Rape of Nanking.

Reliving the macabre experience on behalf of those who suffered it proved so unnerving for Chang that she found it impossible to live with it any more, eventually taking her own life. Her large eyes look up to the skies, in a mute appeal to arouse the righteous instincts in humanity.