At the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were two modern water divisions officially trained in the name of the imperial court, namely the Beiyang Water Division and the Nanyang Water Division, in addition to two local modern water divisions, namely the Fujian Shipping Administration Water Division and the Guangdong Water Division. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the Beiyang Marine Division was naturally the first to bear the brunt of it, and the Guangdong Marine Division also sent three cruisers of "Guangjia", "Guangyi" and "Guangbing" to the north to assist the Beiyang Marine Division in combat. Considering that the rest of the Guangdong Marine Division is all small gunboats and gunboats, it can be regarded as a nest move. The Nanyang Marine Division and the Fujian Shipping Administration Division did not send ships north, but they also had their own reasons.
The Fujian Shipping Administration And Marine Division used the warships built by the Fujian Shipping Bureau itself to form a formation without allocating the remaining ships from other provinces, so although it was the earliest to form an army, most of them were old-fashioned gunboats that were not strong. In the Sino-French War, the Fujian Shipping Administration And Marine Division was even more severely damaged, and almost the entire army was destroyed.
Since then, the Fujian Shipping Administration And Marine Division has not been rebuilt, and for a long time there were only a few armed transport ships. Shortly before the Sino-Japanese War, in January 1893, a torpedo cruiser originally ordered by Guangdong and of the same class as "Guangyi" was launched, but because the Guangdong Marine Division was not funded enough, it was retained by the Fujian Shipping Administration And Water Division, and named "Fujing". However, the official completion of the "Fujing" was not possible until after the Sino-Japanese War, so the Qing court was considering drawing warships from the Nanyang Marine Division to the north.
The Guangdong Admiralty's "Guangcheng" ship, the "Fujing" is of the same type as it.
However, the situation of the Nanyang Marine Division is not optimistic. Due to limited funds, the Nanyang Marine Division had been able to maintain a number of cruisers during the Shen Baozhen and Zuo Zongtang periods. Coupled with the losses in the Sino-French War, by the time of the Sino-Japanese War, only five old-fashioned cruisers in Nanyang, namely "Nanchen", "Nanrui", "Kaiji", "Jingqing" and "Huantai", could go to sea to fight, and their level was roughly equivalent to that of the "Guangjia" of the Guangdong Marine Division. Purely in terms of performance, it can barely play a certain role in the Sino-Japanese War.
"Kaiji" line chart
However, due to financial constraints, coupled with the long age of the ships, the poor maintenance level of the ships of the Nanyang Marine Division, and the lack of training of personnel, its actual combat effectiveness is worrying. When receiving orders from the imperial court, Zhang Zhidong, who was acting the governor of Liangjiang, was also very crisp, indicating that there were not enough sailors and hoping that the Beiyang Marine Division would send people to help drive the ship north. Although this statement is a bit of a deliberate statement, it is also true to a certain extent.
However, after the Yellow Sea War, the Beiyang Marine Division itself also suffered a lot of losses, and after drawing a group of personnel from the Lianyong Battalion to replenish, there were not many surplus sailors, so it was impossible to send personnel south. In the end, the matter was not resolved, and the Nanyang Marine Division did not have a single ship to assist in the war during the war, and it was not until after the war that some warships were dispatched to the north with the "Fujing" to strengthen the coastal defense of Bohai Bay.