The Port Arthur massacre occurred during the First Sino-Japanese War from 21 November 1894 for two or three days, when advanced elements of the First Division of the Japanese Second Army under command of the one-eyed General Yamaji Motoharu (1841-1897) killed somewhere between 1,000 to 20,000 Chinese servicemen and civilians, leaving only 36 to bury bodies,[1] in the Chinese coastal city of Port Arthur (now Lüshunkou). The higher estimates are suspect, however, since a contemporary account of the war estimated Port Arthur's total population at 6,000 (13,000 including garrison troops).[2] Later accounts estimate that 18,000 from each side engaged in the conflict with Chinese dead numbering 1,500.[3]
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As part of its wartime strategy during the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan had advanced through Korea, engaging Chinese troops at Asan near Seoul and then Pyongyang in September 1894, winning decisive victories on both occasions. Following the victory at Pyongyang the Japanese Second Army under Marshal Oyama Iwao (1842-1916) moved northward towards Manchuria, the plan being to seize Port Arthur, headquarters to China's Beiyang Fleet and a highly fortified city that dominated the sea passage from Korea to northeast China. In September the Japanese navy heavily damaged the Beiyang Fleet at the Battle of the Yalu River, though the Chinese troopships were successful in landing their troops not far from the Sino-Korean border. With the Beiyang Fleet eliminated, the Japanese navy began a siege of Port Arthur while the Japanese Second Army advanced on the city through Manchuria and the Japanese First Army crossed the Yalu River to form another advance by land. After a series of battles on the Liaodong Peninsula the First Division of the Second Army led by General Yamaji drew up around Port Arthur in late November. On November 18, 1894 the Japanese movement down the peninsula was temporarily frustrated and returned to find that their wounded that had previously had to be abandoned horribly mutilated with hands and feet cut off.[4] Others had been burned alive.[5] With preparations in place, an artillery bombardment commenced on the night of November 20, 1894 with an infantry assault beginning the following morning. A good part of the city had already been evacuated and fled westward by land or sea into China. The Chinese had mutilated several Japanese bodies and displayed them at the entrance of the city, infuriating the Japanese. After only token resistance the city fell to Japanese troops late on the morning of November 21. What followed was a massacre of the remaining inhabitants of Port Arthur by the storming Japanese troops,[6] though the scale and nature of the killing continues to be debated.[7]
One eye-witness account describes the massacre as indiscriminate and completely barbaric. The account reports that men, women, children, and infants were killed in ways that, according to the author, were too horrific to describe, all while prostrated and begging for mercy. The author describes rooms in which pooled blood covered the floor completely, bodies decapitated and disemboweled, infants skewered and left hanging on walls and counters, heads placed on posts and racks, and other gruesome displays of depravity. The account further describes a scene where civilians were forced into a deep pond and shot at will. Those who tried to escape were stabbed with bayonets as they tried to climb out. A mother holding a small child was killed in the pond while begging for the life of a small child she held in her arms. All the while the Japanese soldiers laughed and reveled in the killing, according to the account.[8]
A quote from the author follows:
Our path lay right across the town, and the dead lay thickly in nearly every street in the quarters we traversed, where, of every age, sex, and condition, they had been promiscuously butchered by the hundred. Here and there the miserable survivors —survivors only for the present—were searching, with low wailings and lamentations, for those they had lost, with the aid of their coloured lanterns, which gave a look of indescribable ghastliness to the mutilated forms they bent over to examine. To my last day I shall remember, with unfading horror, the aspect of those remnants of mortality, in all the hideousness stamped upon them by the unnamable atrocities practised during that diabolical orgy of murder and mutilation, rape, lust, and rapine.
The string of Japanese victories at Pyongyang and then at the Battle of the Yalu River had warmed up what had until then been only lukewarm Western interest in the war. By the time of the assault on Port Arthur, a number of western reporters were attached to the Japanese Second Army. Western reporting on the massacre was controversial. Most correspondents such as the American James Creelman, writing for The New York World, and Frederic Villiers, a writer and illustrator for the London Black and White, described a wide scale and cold-blooded massacre. While Amédée Baillot de Guerville alleged in the pages of the New York Herald that no such massacre had occurred,[9] he later admitted that it had.[10]