Tang Fulong, a survivor of the Nanjing Massacre, passed away on October 9, 2025, at the age of 90.

In 1937, Tang Fulong lived with his family on West Chaotiangong Street in Nanjing. Before the Japanese army occupied the city, they fled into the Nanjing Safety Zone, where refugees were provided with three meals of porridge a day. One day, Japanese soldiers conducted inspections, checking people’s hands for calluses — a sign they might have once been soldiers. For this reason, Tang’s father Tang Zixin, together with his uncle, two uncles-in-law, and a cousin — five family members in total — were taken away. Tang’s mother tried desperately to pull her husband back, but a Japanese soldier stopped her and stabbed her thigh with a bayonet. Tang's relatives, along with hundreds of other civilians, were driven by Japanese troops to Pier No. 4 at Xiaguan on the Yangtze River, where they were executed by machine gun fire. Tang’s third uncle-in-law, who happened to be at the end of the line near the riverbank, saw the Japanese soldiers ready their machine guns, realized what was about to happen, and fell to the ground just before the shooting began, miraculously escaping death.When night fell and everything grew quiet, he crept onto a nearby foreign ship. At dawn the next day, the people on board urged him to flee. He managed to return safely to the refugee camp.“He told my mother that the other four relatives had been shot dead by the Japanese soldiers,” Tang recalled. “My mother later told me the story,” he added, noting that she cried every day during that period.