THE SINO-JAPANESE WAR, 1894–1895

The Sino-Japanese War, July 1894–April 1895, fits into the context discussed at the end of the introduction with one crucial exception: the racial dimension. But overall the background is provided by the obvious point of contrast: Japan, by a very deliberate process of imitation, had been able to absorb western organization and methods and to provide itself with a military capability that by the last decade of the nineteenth century marked it as perhaps the most powerful single state in eastern Asia, whereas China's process of fragmentation had assumed critical—if largely unsuspected —dimensions by this time. The war was not one that was sought by either side but arose from events in Korea that possessed singular importance to Japan: the Korean peninsula was potentially the point of invasion—the Mongol expeditions of 1274 and 1281 had shown this—and at the same time it was Japan's obvious point of entry on the mainland—as witness the Hideyoshi Toyotomi (1537–1598) expedition of 1592–1598. Both China and Japan saw Korea as lying within their own spheres of influence, China by right of historical precedence and Japan in terms of future intent. With the Tientsin Convention of 18 April 1885, the two states had agreed on a treaty that in effect provided for Korean independence but also for their rights of intervention in Korea and the obligation to consult with one another. But war was to come in 1894 as a result of a complicated power-struggle within Korea that prompted separate Chinese and Japanese intervention and that set in train a series of events that led to confrontation.

The war is one that has commanded little in the way of western attention, a state of affairs that one suspects owed itself to three facts of life. First, the war was immediately overshadowed by the Triple Intervention and was then overtaken by the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1905. Second, the war proved to be a one-sided affair and the victories that were won by the Japanese were simple and overwhelming; the war was nothing more than the story of successive and easy Japanese victories—Port Arthur, with a 10,000-strong garrison, was taken at the cost of 66 dead and 353 wounded—and hence there was little in the way of real historical interest or "lessons to be learned." Third, this was a conflict derisively known in the west as the Pigtail War, and with such a name there was an element of racial disdain that complemented the second point: clearly, for most westerners, there was little to be learned, and very little of interest, in a conflict between two manifestly inferior races. Nonetheless, this was a war that saw the first actions between major forces at sea since Lissa (20 July 1866) and the first action involving "modern" warships. In a perverse sense, however, this was a war in which naval power was of secondary importance, a state of affairs that sits uneasily alongside the very obvious fact that Japanese forces could not be deployed to Korea and northern China other than by courtesy of sea power.

The secondary status of naval power in this war stems from the fact that the initial deployment of military forces to Korea by sea by both China and Japan took place before the outbreak of war, and after the declaration of war on 1 August 1894 both sides used transports to move additional forces to Korea without let or hindrance by the other side. The immediate defensive commitment, to provide escort to troopships, and the limited range and endurance of warships meant that the first moves by sea were unopposed on both sides. And there was the episode of 25 July that obstinately refuses to accord with this portrayal of events.

Between 21 and 23 July ten Chinese transports left Taku for Korea, and early on the morning of 25 July the Chinese cruiser Tsi-yuen and gunboat Kuang-yi were off Phung-do Island, off Asan Bay, in anticipation of a rendezvous with the gunboat Tsao-kiang and transport Kowshing when they fell into the company of three Japanese cruisers, the Akitsushima, Naniwa, and the Yoshino. Apparently the Japanese salute was met by Chinese fire on the Japanese ships and in the resultant action the Tsi-yuen escaped while the Kuang-yi was run aground in Caroline Bay, where it was engulfed by a fire that set off the magazine. At the same time the Tsao-kiang and Kowshing appeared on the scene, the Akitsushima 's presence being sufficient to ensure the surrender of the Tsao-kiang without a fight; along with its auxiliary sail, it was to enter Japanese service as the Soko. The Kowshing, however, proved somewhat more difficult. A British ship flying a British flag, it had on board some 1,100 Chinese troops and, with the main action over, it was ordered to follow the Japanese cruisers to port. The Chinese troops tried to seize the ship in an attempt to return to Taku, and in these circumstances the Naniwa, the captain of which was a certain Togo Heihachiro (1848–1934), sank the Kowshing; there were very few survivors, whether Chinese troops or crew. Thereafter, with the declaration of war following this incident, both sides sent troops by sea to Korea, the Japanese via Fusan (6 August) and Chemulpo (12 September) and the Chinese via the ports on Korea Bay at the mouth of the Yalu. It might also be noted, en passant and because the episode seldom commands as much as a mention, that Japanese forces, in addition to the landings at Fusan in southeast Korea and Chemulpo, on the west coast, also landed at Gensan, on the east coast of northern Korea, on 26 August.

In the war that followed there was only one major action at sea, the Battle of the Yalu River/Haiyang, 17 September 1894, though most accounts assert that there were two major actions, the Yalu and Wei-hai-wei, 2–12 February 1895. In reality the latter was not so much an action, or even a series of actions; what happened at sea was the postscript in a siege that began with Japanese landings at Yung-cheng on 20 January 1895 and that resulted in the Japanese capture...