"Kill you, kill you," Zhu Ling chanted softly as her outstretched palms made a slapping motion in the direction of a life-sized cut-out of an armed Japanese soldier. The 14-year-old student had kept mostly silent throughout her field trip to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial. But the sight of the soldier standing arms akimbo - with notches on his rifle to indicate the number of Chinese killed - was too much to bear. "That's disgusting. I've been taught about the massacre but seeing these pictures is different," she whispered fiercely.
The memorial to the infamous Nanjing Massacre - a stark, spartan structure ringed with swaying pine trees in a quiet western suburb of the ancient imperial capital - is a gruesome reminder of atrocities committed by Japanese troops during their 1937 invasion.
Chinese authorities say 300,000 men, woman and children were slaughtered and their bodies dumped in a mass grave, the centrepiece of the memorial, a desolate, pebble-strewn wasteland.
Japanese politicians have often incurred Beijing's wrath by challenging China's account of the massacre, often referred to as the Rape of Nanjing. The 1948 Tokyo war crimes tribunal found Japanese troops killed 155,000 people - mainly women and children - in the former capital of the Nationalists, or Kuomintang.
The grey building takes on weightier meaning with anti-Japanese feelings erupting across China against what many Chinese see as Japan's whitewashing of its wartime past.
Tens of thousands have protested this month, burning Japanese flags, attacking Japanese businesses and missions with bottles and rocks. China's retail industry guild is calling for a nation-wide boycott of everything from Asahi beer to Ajinomoto seasonings, and the country's leaders are still trading barbs.
On any given day, the street outside the memorial is clogged with buses disgorging gaggles of tourists following flag-waving guides equipped with megaphones.
But a hush descends on crowds once they spy a six-foot sculpture of a decapitated head with the death toll 300,000 emblazoned on a wall above it.
"You can't help but go quiet and think of all those lives lost. I've been to Auschwitz-Birkenau but the sense of loss seems greater here," said Manfred Klein, a German tourist.
The silence is shattered briefly as a group of high-schoolers begin heckling a Korean couple, thinking they are Japanese.
"Not Japanese, not Japanese," they shouted as they beat a hasty retreat. At one point on the tour, visitors trace a two-foot-wide, copper-plated walkway imprinted with footprints made by survivors and witnesses to the brutalities of the advancing Japanese army.
The museum's climate-controlled displays encapsulate visual horror - countless bones left, many of children, with bullet or sword wounds and some with feet-long iron spikes stuck through them.
Thirty-something ethnic Chinese Malaysian Patricia Seow shed a tear as she lit a candle in front of the largest display, which contained bones of children as young as three.
"The Japanese did a lot of unspeakable things to a lot of Asians. It means a lot for me to be here," she said.
But the memorial is more than a reminder of the past.
Interspersed along the circuitous route visitors follow are origami doves and notes of peace, and wishes for better relations between the two Asian giants in future.
Some Chinese even seem ready to forget the past.
"This was a long time ago," said Zhang Jianhua, a secretary from the eastern province of Anhui.
"There's a lot of mutual benefit by being friends with Japan. I'm sure not all Japanese people are bad."
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