Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/90

This, too, was manned and officered by trained men, and had been under the direction of a British naval officer, but in material it was inferior to the Northern Squadron, several of the vessels having been built at Shanghai, Foochow, and Canton. Simultaneously with the acquisition and organisation of these naval forces steps were taken to build forts at the mouths of important rivers—as the Peiho, the Min, and the Yangtse—and three naval bases were constructed, namely, Port Arthur and Talien on the Liaotung Peninsula and Wei-hai-wei on the Shantung promontory, these places being fortified according to the best principles of military engineering, and their armaments, as well as those of the river defences, being of the most modern and powerful character. Here, then, the world saw a China apparently powerful for purposes of defence; so powerful indeed that foreign statesmen began to model their policy towards the Middle Kingdom on lines of unprecedented deference; so powerful that when Japan ventured to challenge this revitalised colossus to a life-and-death struggle in 1894, the nations predicted certain ruin for the presumptuous little Empire, and even when the first successes fell to the lot of the pigmy, it was still confidently predicted that the staying power of the giant would be conclusive in the long run. Yet for China there never was a turn in the tide of disaster, never a ray of sunshine in the night of defeat. The war demonstrated beyond all room