ON THIS DAY ·
Battle of Tsushima
27–28 May 1905 — Admiral Tōgō’s fleet destroys Russia’s Baltic squadron, which had sailed about 18,000 nautical miles around Africa to reach it. Russia loses most of its ships, Japan three torpedo boats, and the war moves to the negotiating table.
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The moment in context
Korea was the strategic centre of Japan’s foreign policy, and the war of 1894–95 decided who would dominate it. Japanese leaders saw the peninsula as a dagger pointed at Japan, in a phrase later attributed to the Prussian adviser Jakob Meckel. When a peasant rebellion led by the Donghak religious movement made Korea ask China for troops in 1894, Japan sent a larger force, seized the royal palace in Seoul and declared war on Qing China in August. It won at Pyongyang and off the Yalu in September, and in November its troops took Port Arthur and massacred prisoners and many civilians, marked on the map. The Treaty of Shimonoseki in April 1895 gave Japan Taiwan, the Pescadores and Liaodong, ended China’s claim over Korea and imposed an indemnity, a forced payment like war reparations, of 200 million taels of silver. Within a week Russia, Germany and France made Japan return Liaodong. Japan had learned the rules of imperialism, the scramble among strong states for colonies, and those rules favoured the larger fleet.
From Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, chapter 6 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000 (1910).
The place: Battle of Tsushima — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Korea sat between three empires. Korea’s kingdom was weak, divided at court and traditionally a tributary of China, while Russia expanded towards it from the north. Japanese…
- The turn — Tsushima, 27–28 May 1905. The destruction of Russia’s Baltic fleet decided the war, and it is the hinge of Japan’s transition because it proved that the new state could…
- What it changed — Japan joined the great powers. By 1911, when Japan regained full control of its tariffs, every clause of the treaties of 1858 had been undone, and the alliance with Britain was…
Then ask the room: To what extent was Japan’s transition a success by 1912, and for whom? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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