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Editor’s Note: This is part of a new series of essays entitled “Battle Studies,” which seeks, through the study of military history, to demonstrate how past lessons about strategy, operations, and tactics apply to current defense challenges.
The Battle of the Yalu on Sept. 17, 1894, set the conditions for Japanese victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). The region — if not the world — has been dealing with the ramifications ever since. Strategically, Japanese success guaranteed sea control for an expeditionary assault on Korea and China. Geopolitically, the battle upset assumptions about hierarchies of prestige in East Asia and, more tangibly, led to the Japanese annexation of Taiwan. Technologically speaking, the battle offered a real-world test for novel and largely untried weapons: armored battleships, protected cruisers, and “quick-firing guns.” A globally contested war of words followed, as officials across Europe and the United States attempted to derive useful “lessons” from this natural experiment in modern war.
Strategic Context: One Mountain, Two Tigers
While ostensibly sparked by a rebellion in Korea, the First Sino-Japanese War ultimately grew out of friction between the Meiji Japanese and Qing Chinese empires dating back a generation — if not centuries. In 1874, a Japanese naval expedition to Taiwan shocked Chinese officials and catalyzed a bilateral arms race between China and Japan, one every bit as dynamic as the 19th-century Anglo-French race, albeit on a smaller scale. “Self-strengthening” movements in both empires relied on the acquisition of foreign technology and expertise to build up national power. What the Qing called “strong ships and powerful cannons” were key components of that larger effort. After years of buying ships and organizing armies, both Japan and China seemed well-prepared for war in the 1890s. When a political crisis in Korea triggered Japanese and Chinese intervention on the peninsula, long-running tensions bubbled over into overt hostilities.
The core challenge for the Imperial Japanese Navy was to land forces on mainland Asia. Doing so required control of the sea, and control of the sea necessitated the defeat of the Qing Empire’s North Sea Fleet. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Influence on Sea Power upon History was not translated into Japanese until 1896, but the principles of concentrated fleet engagement and decisive action to achieve sea control already resonated with officers in the Imperial Japanese Navy. In the late summer of 1894, the belligerents deployed their navies to the Yellow Sea. After months of shadowboxing (mostly owing to political restrictions on how far east Chinese ships could steam), the two fleets joined off the Korean coast near the mouth of the Yalu River. As they closed to engage, regional preponderance in Northeast Asia was on the line. The Chinese expression “one mountain cannot hold two tigers” sums up the general situation well.
Most international observers agreed that the Chinese appeared, superficially at least, to be the dominant force. As late as 1891, the Chinese North Sea Fleet had “awed” the Japanese on a port visit to Nagasaki. But appearances — or simple comparisons of orders of battle — can be deceiving. Since the late 1880s, Qing officials had siphoned off naval funds for pet projects. Contemporaneously, and by sharp contrast, the Japanese parliament authorized a disciplined naval build-up, seizing rapid technological changes to catch up with China’s order of battle. The naval race created a security dilemma that, like many naval races, soon contributed to the outbreak of war.
The Battle: Testing Two Modernizations
Contemporary sources disagree on the exact composition of the belligerent fleets, but in effect, a dozen Chinese and Japanese warships met during the engagement. The Chinese counted on an older (built primarily in 1882–1887) and heterogeneous fleet, organized around two ironclad battleships. These ships, the Dingyuan and Zhenyuan, were larger and better armed than anything in the Japanese arsenal. The Japanese fleet was composed of armored or protected cruisers, but most had a more recent vintage (post-1890) and were equipped with “quick-firing guns” capable of shooting five projectiles per minute under combat conditions. How the two fleets — one old and armed with battleships, the other new and composed of quick-firing cruisers — would perform defied prediction. Battle was the only real way to find out who had won a generation-long naval race.
The Chinese commander Ding Ruchang, onboard the battleship Dingyuan, organized his forces into a line abreast with the two ironclads at the center flanked by weaker cruisers and gunboats. In response, the Japanese squadron under Vice Admiral Itō Sukeyuki formed a column, driving toward the Chinese as though crossing a “T.” As he neared Ding’s forces, Itō split his force in two. The faster “flying squadron” veered off at an angle to attack the weaker ships on the exposed right wing of Ding’s line. Itō’s main force then circled the Chinese fleet, attacking the left end of the Chinese formation. From their position at the center of the Chinese line, Ding and his battleships struggled to engage the more mobile Japanese. A breakdown in Chinese command and control exacerbated Ding’s predicament. The Japanese destroyed four Chinese ships and riddled the rest with shell fire. Two smaller Chinese vessels simply fled. As night fell, Itō broke contact, allowing what remained of the North Sea Fleet to escape. The big ironclads Dingyuan and Zhenyuan limped back to the shelter of Chinese port defenses but were badly damaged by artillery and fire.
Chinese officials feebly called this a “victory,” but at best, the Chinese North Sea Fleet survived (barely) as a “fleet in being” bottled up in the Bohai Sea. For several weeks, this rump force nursed its wounds at the northern Chinese port of Weihaiwei. In February 1895, Japanese torpedo boats and amphibious assaults against Weihaiwei finished the job, capturing or destroying the North Sea Fleet in its entirety. Ding committed suicide. When combined with the collapse of Chinese armies at Pyongyang on September 15, 1894, the Japanese victory at the Yalu was decisive — operationally and eventually strategically.
Sketch Map of the Battle of the Yalu River, Century Illustrated (1895)
Turning Point of the War
Over the next months, Japanese forces pressed their advantages home. Like a reverse Trafalgar (1805), the Japanese victory enabled a maritime state to attack a continental power. Amphibious armies carried out operations against Qing continental forces, which performed only marginally better than the Imperial Chinese Navy. Japanese troops crossed the Yalu in October 1894, bringing the war to mainland China. Facing collapse, the Chinese dispatched negotiators to Shimonoseki, Japan to handle the peacemaking. Li Hongzhang, the head of this delegation, had spent the previous decades building the North Sea Fleet as a tool to resist foreign aggression and recover Chinese sovereignty. In the wake of its defeat, he made his way to Japan to oversee yet another humiliation in a century full of setbacks.
The resulting Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) ended the war and came at a steep cost to the Chinese — and Li Hongzhang personally. After arriving with the unenviable task of negotiating a settlement, a Japanese radical shot him in the face. He survived (refusing surgery in order to get on with the deliberations), but centuries of Chinese hegemony in Eastern Eurasia did not. To get peace, Li signed away a massive indemnity, recognized Korean independence from any tributary relationship with China, and ceded Taiwan to Japanese colonization, though insurgency and disease meant Japan’s occupation of the island would cost many lives. He would have given up more had France, Germany, and Russia not intervened — no doubt fearing Japan’s rise as a regional power — to compel Meiji negotiators to give up maximalist claims.
Even when moderated, Japan’s acquisition of Taiwan and the Penghu islands alongside its growing influence in Korea represented a major acceleration in a program of imperial aggrandizement. The annexation of Okinawa (1879) brought Meiji imperialism to the doorstep of continental Asia. In 1895, the Japanese “joined the imperialist club” by taking Taiwan at the expense of the wobbling Qing Empire. Japanese success in the Russo-Japanese War a decade later (1904-1905) followed much the same playbook: victory at sea (the Battle of Tsushima) followed by an expeditionary campaign against another continental power. On a slightly longer timeline, the annexation of Korea in 1910 and the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 trace their roots to the armies Japan dispatched to Northeast Asia after victory at the Yalu in 1894.
Most broadly, the Chinese defeat at the Yalu was a challenge to the legitimacy of the Qing Dynasty. The Battle of the Yalu was a test of self-strengthening or the Foreign Affairs Movement: an effort to build military and economic power to recover lost sovereignty. In an age that so commonly reified navies into markers of civilizational standing, the failure of the North Sea Fleet not only discredited the movement’s leaders, it wrecked Chinese pretensions of regional hegemony and cultural superiority. In the months and years that followed, many ordinary Chinese and some future revolutionaries looked at the Qing defeat and wondered aloud, “What have you done for me lately?” The Xinhai Revolution that brought down the Qing in 1911 is impossible to disentangle from this moment of disillusionment.
Culture Eats Order of Battle for Breakfast
News of the battle came as an ironic shock that journalists, military officers, and pundits struggled to explain. Yes, Meiji Japan was widely admired as a dynamo of industrial progress, but its advances seemed unlikely to overcome Chinese demographic and geographic advantages. Somehow, contrary to expectation, plucky Japan had defeated the massive Qing Empire. How had it happened? In the end, most attributed Chinese defeat not simply to contingency or tactics, but to an underlying weakness in Chinese culture that manifested in the North Sea Fleet as institutional corruption and favoritism.
Institutionally, the North Sea Fleet struggled with what today might be called “talent management.” Corruption and favoritism limited the efficacy of material acquisitions. What good were ships without the skill to maintain and employ them? Western mercenaries commonly complained about the pathologies of late-Qing bureaucracy: favoritism, careerism, or simply “mandarinism.” The Chinese had bought ships, but a decade of underfunding left the North Sea Fleet in need of maintenance and low on supplies. In the months before the war, officials in China requested to upgrade batteries with quick-firing guns, but to no avail. In battle, foreign experts onboard the big ironclads reported artillery shells filled with sand, which, in fairness, looked a lot like gunpowder and was much cheaper. The inability or unwillingness of other regional fleets to cooperate with the North Sea Fleet further diminished China’s numerical advantage over the Japanese. Itō’s fleet attacked as a unified national force while regional officials in Qing China refused to coordinate. For Chinese historians in the Mao era, all this was evidence of the superiority of “people’s war” over investments in a technologically sophisticated military.
Beyond institutional limitations, 19th-century observers (some of them Chinese) were quick to assign a still deeper level of culpability: civilizational culture. The contrast between Japanese progress and Chinese backwardness seemed to lie at the root of victory and defeat. Reciprocally, defeat was “refracted” by foreign observers into a belief in the incompatibility of Chinese culture with modern science and technology. In 1896, the naval historian Herbert Wilson left no doubt about his feeling, writing that the war proved China “is perhaps the most effete and barbarous state in the world.” This cultural thesis fell in line with many of the popular assumptions of late-19th-century Social Darwinism. Strong Japan succeeded, weak China lost.
It is easy to overextend this argument. By any measure, the very making of the North Sea Fleet was a tangible achievement worth celebrating. Yet, that same fleet’s disastrous performance at the Battle of the Yalu, with the right caveats, was (and is) a warning about culture and material power more generally. The Chinese had the stuff — and some proficiency with it at the tactical level. But without a culture of technocracy and meritocracy, the Qing North Sea Fleet became an unusable liability. Culture — be it institutional or national — had a differential effect, and many believed a decisive one at that.
Tellingly, the cultural explanation of defeat was adopted by many Chinese observers themselves. Defeat was an indictment against the status quo leadership in China. Since the Opium War, Chinese reformers held fast to a conviction that Western study was useful for “application,” but Chinese knowledge should be conserved as the “root” of any modernization. After the Yalu, one skeptic of that approach, Yan Fu, went from instructing North Sea Fleet officers at the Tianjin Naval Academy to translating texts on liberalism and Darwinism in an effort to “awaken” the Chinese nation in a cultural or even spiritual sense. In other words, Yan spent his early life supporting “strong ships and powerful cannons” only to conclude after 1894 that such weapons were baubles. What China really needed was a deeper change; for better or worse, it got it in the revolutions of the 20th century.
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Learning (or Not) from Other People’s Wars
The Battle of the Yalu generated a modest library of newspaper stories, journal articles, and intelligence reports. It is easy to understand the excitement. Here was a natural experiment in the efficacy of modern weapons. Professional intelligence agencies were still works in progress (the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence dated only to 1882), but intelligence officers and attachés did their best to understand the war from a tactical and technical perspective. After all, even “scanty indications,” from such real-world engagements, as Alfred Thayer Mahan contended in 1896, were “worth much more than the most carefully arranged programme,” at war colleges and academies in the North Atlantic.
Foreign observers came as journalists, intelligence officers, and mercenaries. William Sims was one of many rushing to the theater to gather information. As the intelligence officer onboard the USS Charleston, he was detailed to shore to explore fortifications and captured warships. His reports provided a granular assessment of the combat power of offensive and defensive weapons. He wrote so many reports that he injured his wrist and had to be medically relieved. When the mercenary Philo T. McGiffin, who served onboard the Zhenyuan, returned home to the United States in 1895, he was enlisted to lecture at the Naval War College and write in national magazines. Alfred Thayer Mahan used McGiffin’s first-person account as the basis for his 1895 “Lessons from the Yalu Fight.” All the while, journalists lit up the telegraph networks, providing detailed (if dubious) commentaries on the course of the war and the sources of victory and defeat.
But just what, exactly, were the lessons to take from this conflict? Mostly, military observers tended to see in defeat confirmation of their existing preferences toward battleship-dominated fleets. Given that Japanese cruisers won out at the Yalu over Chinese battleships, that “lesson” required some heroic rationalization. It went something like this: Yes, the Chinese fleet had been defeated, but Ding’s battleships survived the Japanese cruisers’ rain of shells. With better tactics and artillerists, the Chinese would likely have succeeded. Alfred Thayer Mahan offered an excellent example of this motivated reasoning in action. Even in defeat, he saw the survival of the Chinese ships Dingyuan and Zhenyuan as proof of the “argument of those who favor the battleship as the chief constituent of naval force.” Mahan noted, moreover, that the battle confirmed his assertion that “concentrating force under one command is more efficient than that disseminated among several.” His preferred theory of naval warfare, originally derived from historical research, now appeared validated by empirical observation of modern war.
But were these the right lessons? The process of collecting information and refining it into intelligence on which to make judgments was imperfect and confusing. People are flawed, so too are the data they collect. Analytical biases further distorted matters. Experts downplayed some developments in the war — like the role of torpedoes, logistics, as well as the links between navies and expeditionary warfare — in favor of a selective emphasis on armor, tonnage, and firepower. Reading ex post facto analyses of the battle today gives the sense of selective validation rather than rigorously controlled, objective “lessons.” In a word: “cherry-picking.” Similar temptations are at work today. The aftermath of the Yalu should come as a cautionary example about learning from “other people’s wars.”
Why it Matters: Political Controversy, Heritage, and Experiments
The gap between what most Americans know about the First Sino-Japanese War and the trouble its legacy may one day land them in is genuinely startling. Beijing’s revisionism aims at a region shaped by the Battle of the Yalu and its consequences. Sino-Japanese tensions in the East China Sea, the challenge of managing the U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-South Korean alliances, respectively, and above all, the nebulous status of Taiwan all grew out of Qing defeat in 1894-1895. These dynamics are not so much “past” as they are present politics.
For the People’s Republic of China, the legacy of the Yalu has shaped institutions as well. The defeated North Sea Fleet is at once a rationale for military modernization and a source of heritage. Xi Jinping’s “strong military dream” is justified as a response to defeats in the 19th and 20th centuries, often explicitly to the Battle of the Yalu. “Those who lag behind will be bullied” is a common refrain in propaganda at historical sites. And by implication: Modern Chinese must do better than their late-Qing predecessors. As a vast experiment in industrialization and modernization, the creation of the North Sea Fleet is also a form of heritage for the 21st-century People’s Liberation Army Navy. It offers a kind of origin story in history and popular media for sea power in China.
The Battle of the Yalu also matters globally as a case study in the inherent difficulty of learning from “other people’s wars.” How to account for biases and fragmentary evidence is a major challenge. Notice how observers of the Russo-Japanese War and Spanish Civil War took contradictory insights from the same empirical records of conflict. At present, as intelligence services, industry players, and casual observers debate the implications of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the experience of the Sino-Japanese War begs the questions: Are 21st-century observers smarter than Alfred Thayer Mahan? Can they check biases in ways he could not?
Tommy Jamison, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Strategic Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is the author of The Pacific’s New Navies (2025). The views here do not represent those of the Naval Postgraduate School or Department of Defense.
Image: Walters Art Museum via Wikimedia Commons
