At first, it didn't mean anything to me.

At first, it was just distant buildings that looked wrong.

Then, it was close-up buildings that looked wrong—that were wrong.

But it didn't mean anything. The whole juxtaposition of tilted half collapsed structures propped up to keep from falling the rest of the way over with things like a tourist boardwalk through the ruins was certainly weird but it didn't have any kind of meaning. 

I've unintentionally been to and through quite a number of half demolished areas in China and, other than the scope of destruction, or the weirdness in that it had been left unfinished to grow over with multiple seasons of now winter brown vegetation, it really wasn't all that different from one of those.

The first thing to start chipping away at my mental armor was the faded remains of a spray paint message on one of the ruined buildings with a date proclaiming it "clear" and "partially disinfected". However, perhaps because of the sheer size of the ruins, or the silent wrongness of the occasional bright spot of untouched color like a street sign or a bus stop, that armor remained mostly intact.

I could tell myself that people got out. There were obvious things like the clearly cut open anti-theft bars on a first floor window that indicated that people had gotten out.

The inspirational informational signs with their absurd and often trite messages about things like the amount of money dug out of the ruins of the bank, or how "no one above middle management survived", or that all was left of the school was the bright red national flag and the basketball hoop, they not only did nothing to my mental armor, they actually seemed to trivialize things.

And then I got to the police station.
The police station broke me.

Specifically, the sign outside the police station.

In Memoriam.

Twenty eight of the police officers who went to work at the Beichuan central police station on May 12, 2008 never went home again.

Twenty eight names.
Twenty eight job titles.
Twenty birth dates.
Nineteen photos.

The destruction of Beichuan on May 12, 2008 was so complete that nine of the police officers who died at the central police station left insufficient records (or family members) behind to get photos for their memorial. 
Eight of them didn't even get a birth year.

Near one of the entrances to the ruins of downtown there's a sign that asks visitors to be quiet and respectful. At first glance, it's no different from any other sign at any other tourist site asking visitors to be quiet and respectful. No climbing. No running. No jumping. No loud voices. Normal messages for a normal place.

If you stop for a minute though and read the whole thing through, it's not so normal.

No climbing. No running. No jumping. No loud voices. This is a grave site for nearly 20,000 people. Please be respectful and behave appropriately.

In some places that weren't so close to the epicenter of the quake, a tendency not to be aware of building codes (let alone to follow them) or a tendency to cut corners because building codes are silly unnecessary expensive things that aren't really important, it might have made a difference. Probably not in Beichuan though.