Bloody Saturday

Shanghai’s Darkest Day

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Saturday, August 14, 1937 – that summer Shanghai was expecting to be hit by a typhoon of ‘violent intensity’. The typhoon passed, but what did strike Shanghai was a man-made typhoon of bombs and shrapnel that brought aerial death and destruction such as no city had ever seen before. The clock outside the Cathay Hotel stopped at 4.27 p.m. precisely as the first bombs landed on the junction of the Nanking Road and the Bund; the second wave of explosions struck the dense crowds outside the Great World amusement centre in the French Concession. Bloody Saturday reconstructs the events of that dreadful day from eyewitness accounts.