The article presents an obituary for Iris Chang, a chronicler of the Nanking massacre that occurred in China, 1937. In 1937 around 50,000 Japanese troops descended on Nanking, China's former capital, and took charge there. The Chinese say that more than 300,000 civilians were killed, and 80,000 girls and women raped. In Japan, the Nanking "Incident" is central to a wider debate about history teaching in Japanese schools. Iris Chang's interest in Nanking was aroused incidentally, by hearing her grandparents talk about it. For two years she did research in China, rifling the archives and talking to survivors. When her book on Nanking came out, in 1997, she spent a year on the road talking about it. Her reliance on oral history, especially the fading memories of Chinese witnesses, was unwise. When she died--apparently by shooting herself in the head, on a rural road in California--she had started work on a book on the Bataan Death March and the abuse of American prisoners-of-war by the Japanese. She had been planning, too, to publish the diaries of Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary in Nanking during the massacre.