Perhaps in anticipation of posthumous damnation, Wang Jingwei on his deathbed asked his family and followers not to publish his speeches or essays. A collection of his classical-style verses alone, he declared, would serve as his testament.4 An editorial committee duly compiled and published his poems as Poetry on the Double-Shining Tower in May 1945,5three months before Japan’s surrender. While his late prose writings often reflected Japan’s war propaganda, the portrait that many elicit from Wang’s poems is that of a martyr and romantic figure ready to sac-rifice not just his life, but even his reputation, to save the nation. This lyric persona was embodied by his very sobriquet Jingwei. It was adopted in 1905 when he was a nationalist revolutionary against the Qing Dynasty (1644–1910), ruled by an ethnically Manchu imperial house that con-quered China following scenes of carnage and bloodbath. In an ancient myth recorded in the Classic of Mountains and Seas,6 the namesake bird is the reincarnation of a young princess, drowned in the Eastern Sea. In wrathful vengeance, it tirelessly carries pebbles in its bleeding beak to fill up a surging ocean. This mythological symbol contains a powerful pathos that is a complex of trauma, revenge, and redemption.