Dr. Robert O. Wilson Monument Unveiling Ceremony

The non-profit Righteous Quest Foundation will be hosting an unveiling ceremony in Arcadia for a new monument dedicated to Dr. Robert O. Wilson, an American Methodist missionary who saved Chinese lives during the Nanjing Massacre. 

 

The non-profit Righteous Quest Foundation will be hosting an unveiling ceremony in Arcadia for a new monument dedicated to Dr. Robert O. Wilson, an American Methodist missionary who saved Chinese lives during the Nanjing Massacre. 

 

From the Righteous Quest Foundation: Eighty years ago, a missionary dispatched from Arcadia Methodist church decided to remain in the war zone during the atrocity of Nanjing, China, and saved hundreds to thousands of people’s lives. He was Dr. Robert O. Wilson, Harvard Medical school graduate, who was devoted to his profession as a surgeon and practiced in Nanjing Gulou hospital. When war was approaching in 1937, he decided to risk his own safety to help those helpless people by staying with fourteen American citizens and a few other Westerners. Together they organized the International Committee, and established a Safety Zone; they saved more than two hundred thousand Nanjing inhabitants’ lives. Currently his name is carved on the wall of Nanjing Massacre Museum, though few knew his name or story in his hometown. Today we Chinese American citizens wish to manifest our gratefulness to this American citizen who did such a courageous act and great deed in our father land, and we hope to commemorate him by donating a simple monument placed in the court yard of his church in Arcadia.

 

Here is a link to Wilson's testimony in 1946, from They Were in Nanjing: The Nanjing Massacre Witnessed by American and British Nationals by Suping Lu.