Daniel Renouf was born in August 1937, days after Japanese troops sparked full-scale war with China with an attack at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing. This was only a few months before the Nanjing Massacre, when more than 300,000 people were slaughtered by Japanese troops.

The retired engineer - whose infancy coincided with many historic events - and his wife joined hundreds of visitors on Saturday at an exhibition about one of the single most brutal crimes associated with Japan's invasion of China.

At the time of the massacre, Nanjing was the capital of the Republic of China.