BEIJING — New materials on the savage acts committed by Japanese invaders in the Nanjing Massacre were released by the State Archives Administration on Dec 11 as China prepares to observe the National Memorial Day for victims.

The materials are now kept by Nanjing City Archives.

A local Red Cross Society of China in Nanjing kept records which showed the scale of the atrocity: from Dec 24, 1937 to Jan 6, 1938, 5,704 dead bodies of civilians and soldiers were buried in Hepingmen Gate area; from Jan 6 to May 31, 1938, 6,987 dead bodies were buried ...

In another photo album, which included 21 photos showing the burial sites, captions revealed information about the massacre victims.

“(We’ve taken) 21 pictures showing 56,915 people buried, but there are also some other burial sites where we cannot go to due to money or manpower reasons,” said the photo caption. “For example, along Tongjimen Gate-Zhongshanmen Gate-Maqun belt, there were 78,106 dead bodies being buried.”

The historic materials kept by the Nanjing City Archives also includes contributions from charitable institutions and local residents who helped bury the dead after the massacre. Adding up the numbers, the death toll reached more than 260,000.

This is the fifth in a series of archived material that will be published in the run up to the memorial day. More installments will be released in the week preceding the National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims, on Dec 13.

Japan invaded northeast China in September 1931, followed by full-scale invasion that started on July 7, 1937. Around 35 million Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed or injured in the war against Japanese invasion that continued until 1945.