The Ginling Women's College (now part of Nanjing Normal University) was one of the central locations of the International Safety Zone during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. American missionary Minnie Vautrin turned the college into a refuge, protecting thousands of women and children from Japanese soldiers.
A memorial to Vautrin stands on the campus of Nanjing Normal University, which now occupies the former college grounds. The campus itself, with its early 20th-century American mission architecture, is worth visiting for the architecture and for the layered history of the site. The memorial is smaller and less visited than the main Massacre Memorial Hall, but the intimate scale makes the individual human story more immediate.