In the eyes of most people, late Qing China had no available soldiers due to internal and external troubles. The Xiang army built by Zeng Guofan sounded brave and fierce, and after all, it was only the internal peasant uprising force Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, using cloth armor and white blades to face the foreigners' spears and cannons, and the combat effectiveness was definitely greatly reduced, not to mention that after breaking through Tianjing in 1864, Zeng Guofan also cut himself down the Xiang army in order to protect himself.
The only real soldiers who can be counted as usable soldiers is probably the Beiyang Marine Division, which was established with the development of the Foreign Affairs Movement, but the final outcome is also regrettable. In 1894, with the continuous artillery fire on the sea surface and the huge splashes of water stirred up from time to time, the Beiyang Marine Division was completely defeated in the Sino-Japanese War, and the foreign affairs movement ended, and the late Qing Dynasty added an unequal treaty that lost power and humiliated the country, the Treaty of Maguan.
Many people cannot understand that the Beiyang Marine Division, which consumed so much manpower and material resources of the late Qing government and was backed by the Foreign Affairs Movement, would be defeated. After all, at that time, China's science and technology had lagged behind the Western powers for a hundred years, and the Beiyang Marine Division could also rush into the top ten of the global naval strength, second only to Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Spain, Ottoman Turkey, Italy and the United States, ranking 9th.
But many people do not know that this ranking is not set in stone, and it can even be said that since 1888, the moment when the Beiyang Marine Division was officially established in Weihaiwei, Shandong, the glorious years of the Beiyang Marine Division have passed. Since 1875, after Li Hongzhang created the Beiyang Naval Division under the orders of the Guangxu Emperor, he began to order various warships from Britain and Germany, including the Zhenyuan and Dingyuan, known as the "first ship in Asia", both of which were huge warships with a displacement of up to 7340 tons.
At that time, the situation in Asia was already very tense, and since the Black Ship Incident, japan's national spirit began to awaken, so it embarked on the road of change through the Meiji Restoration; while the Qing government, even if forced to open the door of the country due to the Opium War, still held the dream of the heavenly dynasty and the country, so it refused to move forward, and the gap between China and Japan gradually widened.
In 1886, due to a dispute between Britain and Russia over Jumun Island in southern Korea, the Qing government decided to let the four fleets of Zhenyuan, Dingyuan, Jiyuan and Weiyuan go to Korea together to shock Britain and Russia.
However, because of the Japanese occupation of Ryukyu in 1874, the Beiyang Naval Division's docking at nagasaki port was regarded by the Japanese side as a warning and a show off (in fact, it did mean this), which led to the outbreak of the Nagasaki Incident, and the Beiyang Navy clashed with the local Japanese police. After many negotiations, the conflict ended with China and Japan each making compensation for the losses suffered by the other, but this matter brought about different changes in thinking between the two countries.
The Qing government believed that Japan was afraid of the beiyang naval division's strength, coupled with decades of naval investment, so that the Qing government thought it was too wasteful, so since the end of the Nagasaki Incident in 1886, although the Qing government purchased 10 cruisers and torpedo boats, but the Zhenyuan and Dingyuan class warships were not purchased again; and after the Beiyang Naval Division was formally established as a naval corps in 1888, until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the Beiyang Naval Division did not purchase any guns and ships.
In 1983, the year before the Sino-Japanese War, Ding Ruchang, the admiral of the Beiyang Marine Division, proposed to Li Hongzhang that he wanted to purchase a brand new 18 fast guns for the Dingyuan and other three battleships, but due to insufficient funds, he did not even equip the promised 6 fast guns.
So where did the Beiyang Marine Division's annual naval military expenditure of 4 million taels of silver go? All of them were taken by Empress Dowager Cixi to build her Summer Palace. In the 10 years from 1885 to 1895, Empress Dowager Cixi embezzled a total of 13 million taels of naval military expenditure, which was precisely the 10th year of the fastest renewal of naval equipment in the world.
And the Japanese side? The Nagasaki incident was regarded as a disgrace by them, and Emperor Meiji took the lead in allocating his own court expenses, donating 300,000 yuan a year for the construction of the Japanese navy, and the salaries of the civilian and military officials were also drawn 10 percent, and many donation activities were also carried out.
The slogan of the Japanese Navy is "sinkIng Dingyuan, Zhenyuan", and their newly purchased 3 4000-ton ironclad warships Hashidate, Itsukushima and Matsushima, although they are not as good as Zhenyuan and Dingyuan in tonnage, but specially designed to sink Zhenyuan and Dingyuan, equipped with various cannons, completely surpassing the Chinese warships in the main gun caliber. And the number of Japanese rapid-fire guns is 7 times that of the Beiyang Marine Division.
When the Nagasaki Incident broke out in 1886, Japan had only three main ships with a displacement of only 3,000 tons. In 1990, the total tonnage of the main warships of the Japanese Navy was more than 17,000 tons, and the number of warships above 2,000 tons was 5; the Beiyang Naval Division was more than 27,000 tons, and there were 7 warships of more than 2,000 tons. When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894, the total tonnage of the main warships of the Japanese Navy reached 37,222 tons, and the Beiyang Naval Division was still more than 27,000 tons, specifically 27,470 tons.
Looking at it this way, does anyone still think that the failure of the Beiyang Marine Division was an accident? There is an old Chinese saying called "thinking of danger in times of peace", the Qing government not only failed to do it, but even "thought of danger and peace", in vain buried so many chinese naval and military forces, sad, lamentable!