It was 9:15 in the morning on August 19, 1932, and three judges nervously entered a courtroom in Nanjing, ready to hand down a long-awaited sentence. Nanjing was the newly established capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist (Guomindang) government in east-central China, but the city had a long history, having served as a dynastic capital for centuries. When Chiang declared it his capital in 1928 after leading a military campaign to reunify China, his government immediately set about modernizing Nanjing with new government buildings and wide boulevards, and by building new railroad stations and an airport. He wanted to build a modern state so that China could take back its sovereignty from the western powers (Britain first and foremost among them), whose imperial ambitions had humiliated and stripped the country of its autonomy in the wake of the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century. Chiang believed that under his leadership, China was poised to resume its rightful place as one of the world’s great powers.