¶ The strategic railway running northward from Shanghai was cut last week when the Nationalists captured Nanking, a 2,000-year-old walled city of 400,000 inhabitants which was the capital of China five centuries ago. The effect of cutting the railway at Nanking was to bottle up the defeated Shantungese troops who were trying to escape northward, leaving them at the mercy of their Nationalist conquerors.
¶In these circumstances very marked disorder and looting broke out in Nanking. It was not clear that the insurgents were predominantly of one faction or the other.
Soon they had...
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