An atlas of the east China city of Nanjing charted and printed by the Japanese during World War II has been discovered in north China's Hebei Province.

"The latest map of Nanjing" as it is called, was printed in October, 1938, and on it, several ponds are clearly marked opposite the old supreme court of Nanjing.

This map will be a persuasive evidence in a lawsuit involving Shiro Azuma, 88, a former Japanese soldier who published his war diary describing how Japanese invaders killed Chinese civilians inChina during World War II. Azuma recently lost a lawsuit in Tokyo when it was ruled that what he had said was not true.

The newly revealed map is 68 centimeter longs and 49.5 centimeters wide with a scale of 1:20,000, and shows the date of issue, the name and address of the distributor, the name of the copyright holder and publisher, and the name, address, and telephone number of the publishing house.

Song Xiangyang, a worker in Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei province, bought the map last December at a secondhand book vender.

The map was appraised as an original copy by Cheng E'bin, former chief engineer of the Hebei Provincial Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, and Bai Xiangang, senior engineer of the Bureau.

Invading Japanese troops massacred some 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers in Nanjing on December 13, 1937.

The Japanese right-wing's gathering in Osaka, Japan, on January23 to deny the reality of the Nanjing Massacre aroused protests among both Chinese and Japanese.