Minnie Vautrin

Missionary Educator in Nanjing

Minnie Vautrin was born on 27 September 1886 in Secor, Illinois. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1912, she was sent to China by the United Christian Missionary Society and first served as principal of a girls' secondary school in Luzhou prefecture (present-day Hefei), Anhui province. When Ginling Women's College was founded in Nanjing in 1916, she was appointed to head its education department; in 1919, after earning a master's degree in education from Columbia University, she became Acting President of Ginling College, a post she held until Dr. Wu Yifang took office in 1928 as the college's first Chinese president. She subsequently remained as Dean of Studies, assisting Wu in running the college, and spent over two decades in China deeply committed to her students and the college. When the Japanese assault on Nanjing became imminent in late 1937, she refused to evacuate.

The Living Goddess of Ginling

After the fall of Nanjing, Vautrin transformed Ginling Women's College into a refuge, admitting women and children from December 1937 onward; at its peak, the campus sheltered over 10,000 women and children. Vautrin stood at the college gate daily, turning away Japanese soldiers who sought to enter and remove women. She intervened personally on countless occasions, placing herself between soldiers and civilians. Chinese refugees called her "Hua Guanyin" — the Goddess of Mercy. She kept a detailed diary throughout the massacre, recording the systematic nature of the violence and the relentless pressure on the safety zone. The refugee camp operated until it was gradually wound down in 1938.

Trauma and Death

The psychological cost of what Vautrin witnessed and was unable to prevent proved insurmountable; doctors diagnosed her with severe depression, what would today be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. She suffered a breakdown in 1940 and was sent back to the United States for treatment. In the spring of 1941 she survived an earlier suicide attempt by sleeping pills; on 14 May that year, she died by suicide in her Indianapolis apartment by opening the gas jets of her kitchen stove. She was fifty-four years old. Her diary, preserved at Yale Divinity School alongside Rabe's, was published in English in 1999 under the title Terror in Minnie's Diary and is considered one of the essential firsthand accounts of the massacre. She was posthumously awarded a citation by the Chinese government. Ginling College commemorates her with a monument on campus.