Chinese American Lu Zhaoning and his parents donated more than 100 pieces of cultural relics including Chennault’s envelope, US military badge, US Flying Tigers flight scarf map, US Air Corps manual and magazines, promotional cards and old photos of the World War II.
Lu Zhaoning is from Nanjing. His grand-aunt Lu Meiyin was born in Nanjing in 1914. Lu Meiyin was a former air crew member of China. When she was 26 years old, she was shot to death by the Japanese aircraft when she was trying to save a baby after her civil aviation airliner was forced to land. Lu is the only female aviation martyr at the Nanjing Memorial Cemetery to the Anti-Japanese Aviator Martyrs.
Lu Zhaonin, born in Nanjing in 1964, immigrated to the US at the age of 16. He was deeply touched by the book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II written by Chinese American writer Iris Chang in 2000 and then he started to collect materials about the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Lu would buy such cultural relics from overseas auction sites and then donate them to Nanjing. He has donated over 2,000 cultural relics to The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.
Among the donations, one DC-2 aircraft model was based on the plane boarded by Lu Meiyin when she was killed. There is also a magazine Life published in 1942 that has a series of photographs showing the successful shooting down of a Japanese plane by Chinese anti-aircraft. This is the first such photo collected by the museum. The magazine features photos of Chinese pilots receiving training in the US during the war.
