About 3,000 Buddhist monks and masters from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao attended a service on Monday at the Lingguang Temple in Beijing to pray for world peace.

"We must take history as a mirror and face the future to promote peaceful co-existence between different countries," Sheng Hui, vice-president of the China Buddhist Association, said.

On August 15, 1945, Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced his country's surrender to the allied powers, marking the end of World War II.

Also on Monday, more than 120 military attachés from 35 foreign embassies in Beijing visited the exhibition near the Marco Polo Bridge. The exhibition commemorates the 60th anniversary of China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the end of World War II.

The group expressed the wish that all countries learn from history and cherish peace.

There are more than 600 pictures, 800 relics, and reconstructed scenes on display.

"It's very moving, and I can see the bravery of the Chinese soldiers through the show," said Leroy Coleman, a United States air attaché.

"But, no museum or exhibition can fully depict what the Chinese people suffered during the war," Coleman added.

Choe Myong-hun, deputy military attaché for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, said people of the Korean Peninsula share the Chinese people's feelings because "we fought side by side against a common enemy."

In Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu Province, an exhibition of historical documents and records are on display at the Nanjing Museum. The exhibition was opened to the public on Monday morning. It will run until September 15.

Exhibits include more than 300 historical documents and 400 pictures, depicting Chinese people's courageous deeds during the eight-year war.

Exhibits also showcase atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during their occupation of Nanjing.
 
At least 300,000 people, most of them civilians, were killed by Japanese troops in what is now known as the Nanjing Massacre, which started on December 13, 1937 and lasted for a month.

Hundreds of people from the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions and Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) marched to the Consulate-General of Japan yesterday morning, urging the country to learn from history.

Pang Cheung-Wai, a member of the central standing committee of the DAB, said that 60 years after the war, Japan still adopts history books that glosses over its aggression, and its top politicians still visit the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where 14 Class-A war criminals are enshrined.

The two organizations strongly requested the Japanese Government apologize and compensate victims.

The Hong Kong Reparation Association and some other organizations also marched to the consulate-general later in the day.

(China Daily August 16, 2005)