In 1894 Beijing held a sixtieth birthday party. A few months later, the Beiyang Fleet was gone.
《神州大地》第 8 集 · English · 28:57
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Begin with two things in Beijing,

in November 1894. On the seventh of November

the tenth day of the tenth month,

in the twentieth year of the Guangxu

reign — Empress Dowager Cixi turned sixty.

The court had been preparing for two years.

The plan was to receive the congratulations

at the Summer Palace, with decorated shelters,

scripture platforms and opera stages set up

all the way from the palace to

the garden. According to the Celebrations for

the Empress Dowager's Sixtieth Birthday archives,

on two headings alone — funds drawn from

the Board of Revenue and contributions coordinated

outside the capital — the silver that can

be verified comes to more than 2.98

million taels, contributed by governors-general, governors,

garrison commanders and imperial princes.

In that same month, cities on the

front were falling one after another.

These two things happened in the same

year, in the same month, and inside

the decision-making of one city.

And there was one more thing that

year: the Beiyang Fleet was gone.

The fire came from Korea.

On 4 May 1894, a peasant war broke out

in the south of Korea, raised in

the name of the Donghak movement.

The Korean court could not put it down and

asked the Qing court to send troops.

On 2 June, the Japanese cabinet decided to

send forces. On 7 June, the two sides

exchanged notes. The Qing court said it was sending

troops at Korea's request and would withdraw

once the matter was settled.

Japan said its troops were there to

protect its legation and its nationals.

Over the following month, Qing and Japanese

troops both reached Korea.

The Qing army camped at Asan;

Japanese troops entered Seoul.

On 23 July, Japanese troops occupied the Korean

royal palace. On 25 July, in the waters

off Pungdo, the Japanese Combined Fleet sank

the Gaosheng, a British-flag transport the Qing court

had chartered to carry troops.

More than seven hundred people were aboard.

On 1 August, the Qing court declared war under

pressure; the same day, Emperor Meiji issued

Japan's declaration. Only then, formally, had the

war begun.

Seen from Beijing, the easiest thing to

miss about this war is that things

at sea had already begun before war

was declared. Gaosheng was a British-flag merchant

ship, chartered by the Qing court to carry

troops. What sank it were warships of

the Japanese Combined Fleet.

The ship went down.

Who was aboard, and how many died,

is recorded differently in different accounts.

This film gives no single number.

And that day was still seven days

before the declaration of war.

Once the declarations were issued, the two

armies each took up their positions.

Pyongyang, in the north of Korea,

was where the Qing army concentrated.

Japanese forces advanced on it along four

routes.

On this Korea line there is one

man who, in 1912, will stand at the

centre of another matter.

His name was Yuan Shikai.

He was born in 1859 in Xiangcheng,

Henan. He failed the provincial examination twice,

in 1876 and 1879, and joined the Huai Army under

Wu Changqing. In August 1882, the Imo mutiny

broke out in Korea and Qing troops

entered Seoul; he distinguished himself in that

operation. In 1884, Korean reformers, with Japanese backing,

staged the Gapsin coup and seized the

royal palace; he led troops and put

it down. In 1885, on Li Hongzhang's recommendation,

Yuan Shikai, aged twenty-six, was appointed to

supervise Korean trade and diplomatic affairs.

He spent roughly twelve years in Korea

in all, and returned to China in 1894.

That year, was 1894 — the year of

this war. After returning, Yuan Shikai was

sent to Xiaozhan, near Tianjin, to train

troops. This film sets him down here,

for now.

Now, that fleet. In October 1885, the Qing court

established the Office for the General Administration

of Naval Affairs, usually called the Navy

Office. Its presiding minister was Prince Chun,

Yixuan; its associate ministers were Yikuang and

Li Hongzhang; the man who actually held

the power was Li Hongzhang.

This office had one curious feature:

it had no premises of its own.

After its founding it borrowed the offices

of the Shenjiying guards, and borrowed the

Shenjiying seal for its documents; it did

not receive its own official seal until

three years later. A new building was

planned at Fenzi Hutong near the Xisi

archway, and it was never finished,

not even by the time Prince Chun

died. Its structure followed that of the

Zongli Yamen and the Shenjiying.

Most of its early staff were bannermen,

and almost none of them had any

naval background. Among the talk of the

court and the capital at the time,

the office carried another name — the " Summer

Palace Works Office". Some called it the

"seventh ministry", outside the usual six.

This film will come back to that

name later.

The one large thing the Navy Office

did accomplish was the Beiyang Fleet.

In 1888, the Beiyang Fleet was formally constituted,

and the Beiyang Fleet Regulations were issued.

Its flagship was Dingyuan; her sister ship

was Zhenyuan. Both were among the largest

ironclads then afloat, with main guns of

305 millimetres. At its formation the fleet

had a certain number of ships and

some four thousand officers and men

the counts differ by source, so this

film uses one verifiable formulation: formed in 1888,

and at the outbreak of the war

in 1894 it had twenty-five ships and more

than four thousand officers and men.

There is a phrase that circulates about

this fleet: "the strongest fleet in Asia".

This film does not use it

it appears only in later media writing,

and no scholarly basis for it can

be found. That year, this fleet was

one of the largest projects the Qing court

had put money into.

And its next new ship never arrived.

On 1 June 1891, the Board of Revenue submitted

a memorial, Proposed Measures for Raising Military

Funds. The memorial proposed that the northern

and southern fleets suspend for two years

their purchases of foreign guns, ships and

machinery, and that the silver saved be

sent to the Board to cover military

expenses. The man who put it forward

was the Minister of Revenue, Weng Tonghe,

and his reasoning was eight characters:

"the Board's treasury is empty, and the

coast is quiet. " Li Hongzhang was at

that moment inspecting the Beiyang Fleet.

Back in Tianjin he replied: having weighed

it repeatedly, funds are at present extremely

short, and all major purchases of ships

and weapons should, as proposed, be suspended.

That suspension was never lifted again.

Three years later, in May 1894, Li Hongzhang

inspected the fleet for the third time,

and wrote this in his report: "

" In the Western countries ship design changes

month by month. Even Japan, a small

country, manages to economise and add a

great ship every year.

Since the Beiyang Fleet was established in 1888,

China has not added a single ship,

and I fear it will be hard

to continue. " In March of that same

year, Admiral Ding Ruchang proposed fitting eighteen

modern quick-firing guns to the main ships,

at a cost of six hundred thousand

taels. That money was not approved.

And in those same years, the Japanese

navy was adding ships.

In 1894 the Japanese navy had thirty-one warships

of various sizes and twenty-four torpedo boats.

The other side of the record must

be given here as well, because the

Board of Revenue later had its own

answer. The Board argued that "it never

proposed a suspension before, nor blocked purchases

after", and listed cases in which Xinjiang,

Gansu, Fujian, Anhui and Hunan bought foreign

arms, saying: "the northern fleet alone bought

nothing — which must mean that province had

ships and weapons enough, and needed nothing

from abroad. " The researcher Jiang Ming has

also pointed out: " Li Hongzhang never explained

why, after 1893, he stopped asking to buy

ships. " Both sides of the record are

placed here together.

Now back to the other name of

that office. The Summer Palace began as

the Garden of Clear Ripples, first built

in 1750, the fifteenth year of the Qianlong

reign. In 1860, the tenth year of the

Xianfeng reign, it was burned by the

Anglo-French forces. In 1886, the twelfth year of

the Guangxu reign, Prince Chun, Yixuan,

petitioned to "repair the Garden of Clear

Ripples so that naval drills might be

held there", and proposed founding a naval

school on Kunming Lake; the Empress Dowager

drew on silver in the name of

raising naval funds to rebuild the garden.

Specialists put the cost of the works

at roughly five to six million taels.

The works were directed by Lei Tingchang,

the seventh generation of the Lei family

of imperial architects. In 1888, the fourteenth year

of Guangxu, an imperial edict took the

phrase "nurturing harmony" and renamed the garden

the Summer Palace — Yiheyuan.

In 1891, the seventeenth year of Guangxu,

Cixi took up residence there in earnest.

From then until 1908 she lived in the

garden through spring, summer and autumn each

year, and the major affairs of the

court, policy decisions and receptions of foreign

envoys mostly happened there.

In that garden there is one boat,

and it is unusual.

It is called the Marble Boat.

It was built in 1755, the twentieth year

of Qianlong, and its hull is carved

from a single mass of stone.

In 1860 its Chinese-style cabin was burned.

In 1893, the nineteenth year of Guangxu,

at Cixi's wish, that cabin was rebuilt

in Western style, fitted with coloured glass,

and renamed the Boat of Clear Seas

Qingyanfang. It is the only building in

the garden in a Western style.

A boat made of stone.

It will never sail.

So how much money was it?

A very popular sentence says: " Cixi diverted

the navy's funds to build the Summer

Palace. " That sentence can be taken apart

into three layers. First layer: did it

happen? It did. That the Navy Office

also managed the Summer Palace works,

and that the accounts of the two

overlapped, can be seen in the archives.

Second layer: how much?

This is the difficult layer — the surviving

accounts number at least six, and they

differ widely: Some four million taels

later research; Some 7.5 million taels

Jiang Ming's calculation from surviving Qing palace

archives; Close to eight million taels

according to surviving archival records;

Some 8.6 million taels — the tally of

Qi Qizhang, who also counts a further

4.36 million taels of naval funds diverted

to the Three Seas works;

Some ten million taels — another estimate of

the total cost of the garden works;

Twenty to thirty million taels, and in

some tellings eighty million — the figure long

in general circulation. This film gives no

single number. All six accounts are placed

here. Third layer: was this the main

cause of the defeat?

Scholars do not agree, and this film

does not judge. One fact belongs here:

linking the garden works to the defeat

at sea is generally traced to Liang

Qichao. The researcher Jiang Ming puts it

directly: the late-Qing reformer Liang Qichao was

the first to connect the palace works

to the failure in the naval war

of 1894, in order to stir hatred

of Cixi. The figure of thirty million

taels also comes from Liang Qichao's Words

on the Partition of China.

And the fact on the other side

must stand beside it: the 2.6 million

taels that Prince Chun raised from the

provinces in the name of the "navy"

were never drawn on as principal;

the sum was deposited in foreign banks

and lent to the Kaiping Mining Bureau

to earn interest, and the interest was

used to repay the one million taels

that had been shifted out of the

naval funds. Jiang Ming also notes that

this money "was in fact entirely the

tribute of provincial governors to Cixi,

and cannot be counted on the navy's

account". A popular sentence tends to press

fact, number and cause into one thing.

Take it apart, and you hold one

more measure than the person who says

the sentence.

In this passage the film does one

thing only: it sets two dates side

by side.1 June 1891: the Board of Revenue

asks that the northern and southern fleets

suspend purchases of foreign guns and ships

for two years.4 June 1891: the Summer Palace

is substantially complete, and Cixi begins her

progress through it. Two dates.

Three days apart. One is in a

memorial in Beijing. One is in a

garden in Beijing. Whether those three days

are one matter or two, this film

does not say. The two dates are

real.

On 15 September 1894, Japanese forces attacked Pyongyang along

four routes. The Qing commander Ye Zhichao's

dispositions were confused; General Zuo Baogui held

the Xuanyuan gate and was killed there,

and the position fell.

That night Ye Zhichao led his troops

in a retreat across the river.

On 17 September, two days after Pyongyang,

the Beiyang Fleet was on its way

home after escorting an army landing.

Crossing the sea off Dadonggou, outside the

mouth of the Yalu, it met the

Japanese Combined Fleet. That day was the

Battle of the Yellow Sea.

How many Beiyang ships fought differs by

account; this film uses a formulation like

"some dozen" and gives no single number.

The number of Japanese ships engaged is

likewise recorded differently. The battle lasted about

five hours. The Beiyang side lost several

ships, and more than a thousand officers

and men were killed or wounded;

every Japanese ship engaged was also damaged.

At about a quarter to six that

afternoon, the Japanese side broke off.

After the battle, the Beiyang Fleet withdrew

into Weihaiwei.

That day a ship went down.

Her name was Zhiyuan, and her captain

was Deng Shichang. Deng Shichang was from

Panyu, Guangdong, born on 17 September 1849, a graduate

of the first class of the Foochow

Dockyard School. The day of the Yellow

Sea battle was his forty-fifth birthday.

Why did Zhiyuan sink?

To this day there are four accounts.

The first is the most widely told:

Deng Shichang drove Zhiyuan at the Japanese

cruiser Yoshino, and she was struck by

a torpedo on the way in and

sank. One result of checking must be

stated here: neither the Chinese nor the

Japanese archival record contains any account of

" Zhiyuan ramming Yoshino. " The naval historian Chen

Yue worked through the formations and movements

of both sides once, on 17 September 2014,

the hundred-and-twentieth anniversary of the battle,

and found that the direction Zhiyuan's bow

was facing was the Japanese flagship Matsushima;

Yoshino at that moment was behind Zhiyuan,

which could not have turned about to

ram her. The second account: water came

in over the bow until it swamped

the boilers and set off a large

explosion — this is Chen Yue's reading.

The third: a large-calibre shell pierced the

hull near the waterline and she took

on a great deal of water.

The fourth: a large-calibre shell struck the

torpedo compartment on her side and detonated

the "black-head" torpedoes stored there.

After a torpedo fuse was found in

the 2016 underwater survey, some specialists consider

this the most likely.

But the archaeologists reserve judgement.

Zhou Chunshui, a research fellow at the

National Centre for Underwater Cultural Heritage,

has said plainly: "on the evidence available,

it is not possible to infer how

the Zhiyuan sank. " The hull below the

waterline is relatively intact, which largely rules

out the torpedo theory; and the fuse

found proves only that torpedoes were carried.

Four accounts, and all are accounts.

Archaeology has not decided, to this day.

Of more than two hundred officers and

men aboard, only a few survived.

Deng Shichang did not leave his ship.

After the battle, the Beiyang Fleet fell

back on Weihaiwei. Ships whose repairs were

unfinished came into harbour still damaged.

Around 20 January 1895, Japanese forces landed at Rongcheng

Bay in Shandong, then took the batteries

behind Weihaiwei, and pressed the fleet from

land and sea together with the Combined

Fleet. On the night of 4 February

other accounts say the small hours of

5 February — Japanese torpedo boats broke into the

harbour, and the flagship Dingyuan was struck

by a torpedo in the stern and

run aground to keep her afloat.

On 9 February, Dingyuan's captain Liu Buchan ordered

the ship filled with explosives and blown

up, then took his own life.

He had once made a promise:

"if the ship is lost, I end

myself. " On 11 February, Admiral Ding Ruchang refused

to surrender and took poison.

About his end there is another account

of foreign advisers and fearful officers pressing

him to surrender, and of a British

adviser signing the surrender in his name

the next day. This film sets both

accounts side by side.

On 14 February, the Weihaiwei surrender agreement was

signed. On 17 February, Japanese forces occupied Liugong

Island. The surviving ships were taken,

and Zhenyuan was among them.

The Beiyang Fleet ends here.

This is as far as the film

takes it: a fleet was gone,

and the harbour was still in place.

In March 1895, Li Hongzhang was appointed plenipotentiary

of the first rank and sent to

Japan to negotiate peace.

The place was the Shunpanro, at Shimonoseki in

Yamaguchi; across the table were Japan's prime

minister Ito Hirobumi and foreign minister Mutsu

Munemitsu. In the negotiations, the indemnity Japan

first demanded was three hundred million taels

of silver. In April, Japan presented an

ultimatum. Li Hongzhang telegraphed the court,

and Guangxu replied: "if truly nothing can

be revised, then follow the earlier instruction

and conclude the treaty. "

On 17 April 1895, Li Hongzhang signed the Sino-Japanese

Treaty of Peace with Ito Hirobumi and

Mutsu Munemitsu — the Treaty of Shimonoseki.

It took effect on 8 May 1895.

The text of the treaty reads:

Article I: China recognises the full and complete

independence of Korea. Article II: China cedes

to Japan in perpetuity the following places

one, the southern portion of Fengtian province,

with a boundary line annexed; two,

the island of Taiwan and all islands

appertaining to it; three, the Penghu islands.

Article IV: China will pay Japan two

hundred million taels of treasury silver as

war indemnity, in eight instalments.

Article VI: China opens Shashi, Chongqing,

Suzhou and Hangzhou as treaty ports.

Article VIII: Japanese forces will occupy Weihaiwei

temporarily, at an occupation cost of five

hundred thousand taels of treasury silver per

year. One point that is often flattened

in summary should be stated: Article II

of the treaty reads "the southern portion

of Fengtian province", with a boundary line

annexed — not the general phrase "the Liaodong

peninsula", which is how later summaries usually

put it. This film quotes the treaty

as it reads.

Before the signing, something happened that is

rare in international negotiation.

On the afternoon of 24 March 1895, after the

third round of talks, Li Hongzhang rode

in his sedan chair from the Shunpanro

back to his lodging at Injō-ji.

At a street corner the crowd was

thick and the bearers slowed.

A man broke through to the front

of the chair, pressed his left hand

on the bearer's shoulder, and raised a

pistol in his right.

The bullet struck below Li Hongzhang's left

eye and lodged in the cheekbone;

the bleeding would not stop.

He fainted where he was and came

round shortly after; when the chair reached

the gate of Injō-ji, he walked in

on his own feet.

The man who fired was named Koyama

Toyotaro, from Gunma prefecture, unemployed.

The case was tried at the Yamaguchi

district court. After this, the Japanese side

agreed to a ceasefire; Emperor Meiji sent

two surgeon-generals to Shimonoseki to treat Li

Hongzhang. On 17 April, his face bound in

bandages, Li Hongzhang signed the treaty.

The indemnity went from the three hundred

million first demanded to two hundred million.

Whether one caused the other, this film

sets the two side by side and

does not judge.

The news of the treaty reached Beijing

during the metropolitan examination, when candidates from

every province were in the city.

From 1 to 3 May, Kang Youwei,

Liang Qichao and others organised a joint

petition by provincial candidates at Songjun'an in

the southern city — the shrine of Yang

Jiaoshan — opposing the treaty and calling for

rejection of the peace, removal of the

capital, and reform. About this, two records

have to be given.

One is the account of Kang Youwei

and Liang Qichao themselves: more than six

hundred signed, the petition was very large,

and hearing that the treaty had already

been signed, it was not submitted to

the Censorate. The other is later research

and the doubts it raises: the Censorate's

own record of that day's business,

and Weng Tonghe's diary for that day,

contain no record of "over twelve hundred

candidates petitioning at the Censorate. "

A researcher reconstructed the list and found

that Kang Youwei's name is not on

it; and in those days provincial candidates

petitioned on their own account in thirty-one

separate petitions, totalling more than fifteen hundred

signatures. On its scale, and on whether

it was submitted, the accounts differ.

This film gives both, gives no single

number, and does not write that it

was refused.

After the treaty, three more things happened.

The first: on 23 April 1895, Russia, Germany and

France intervened and demanded that Japan return

the Liaodong territory. The second: on 8 November 1895,

China and Japan signed the Treaty for

the Return of Southern Liaoning; Japan returned

the southern portion of Fengtian province,

and the Qing court paid three hundred million

taels of treasury silver to redeem it.

The third: inside the court there was

a discussion of considerable scale.

After receiving Kang Youwei's memorial, Guangxu ordered

a copy made, and on 19 July sent

it out together with eight other memorials

to the generals and governors of the

provinces for discussion. All of this happened

in the same year as the treaty.

The film stops here, and does not

push further.

After 1895, the people went their separate ways.

Weng Tonghe died in 1904.

Li Hongzhang died in 1901.

Yuan Shikai, in 1912, stood at the centre

of another matter. Deng Shichang had no

old age. What the fleet left behind

is still in place.

On Liugong Island at Weihai, the old

site of the Beiyang Fleet headquarters is

today's Chinese Jiawu War Museum.

On the island there is also a

full-size replica of Dingyuan, which visitors can

board. The armour plate stripped from the

original Dingyuan stands today inside Dazaifu Tenmangu

in Fukuoka, Japan, made into a gate

and the gun ports and the rivet

holes in it are still there.

Zhiyuan lies in the waters off Daludao,

in Dandong, Liaoning. The underwater archaeology team

has worked there since 2014; in 2016 the underwater

survey was declared closed.

To this day, raising her whole is

not on the agenda.

The Summer Palace is still there.

In 1998 it was inscribed on UNESCO's World

Heritage List. The Boat of Clear Seas

still sits on the north-west shore of

Kunming Lake — and its hull is made

of stone. From 1894 to now, more than

a hundred and thirty years.

Those halls, that stone boat, that gate,

that seabed — all of them still in

the same place.

This is Shenzhou: China's Living Heritage.

We place the fact, and where it comes

from, in front of you together.

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