Over the winter of 1937, Japanese troops in Nanjing unleashed a relentless onslaught of looting, burning, torture and murder.
The film's fictional mortician has a factual inspiration: 27 westerners were in Nanjing when it fell to the Japanese, many exhibiting extreme bravery.
Chang spent time at Manchester university as part of a jointly-run course with his home university in Nanjing, eastern China, and was sufficiently impressed to stay on in the country as a postgraduate.
But the most infamous crime they committed was rape – for which the episode is sometimes called the Rape of Nanjing.
The film is set in Nanjing, then the capital of China, in December 1937, just as invading Japanese soldiers take control.
It may be more interesting for what it says about the Chinese film industry than the Nanjing massacre, but what it says about the Chinese film industry is remarkable.
In a statement on Tuesday, Nanjing Xinjiekou Department Store, the listed retail arm of Sanpower, said it would sign the deal shortly and would set up a wholly owned subsidiary in the UK to acquire the stake.
This epic tale of the Nanjing massacre of 1937 had a budget of $100m, stars a western A-lister, and has almost half its dialogue in English.
In Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing prices jumped by more than 20%; in slightly smaller cities, such as Nanjing and Xiamen, they rose by around 15%.Follow the moneyDespite these signs of rude health, even some of China's biggest property moguls appear to be growing uneasy.
The version that was submitted for government approval in 2000 played down Japan's aggression in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 and the occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s, and avoided mention of the use of sex slaves by its armies or the rape of Nanjing.
One, for use at primary schools in Jiangsu province, of which Nanjing is the capital, is titled "Memory of Blood and Fire".
