FOREWORD China's struggle for naval development was confined to the early period of her unhappy contact with the modern world,from the Opium War of i840 to the year 1895.The Chinese navy of the 188o's and 18go's,a front line of defense against foreign aggres- sion,was one of China's first modern achievements.But it came to an abrupt end and its history was all but lost to view in the con- fusion attending the collapse of the imperial order.While China's military development continued steadily,through successive phases marked by the Hunan army,the Peiyang army,the Whampoa cadets,and the People's Liberation Army,naval development came to a halt as if the Peiyang fleet had been sunk without trace or sur- vivors.This story has the fascination of high tragedy.Professor Rawlinson's analysis in this volume puts it also in the perspective of China's problem of modernization. The late-Ch'ing attempt to modernize included an extensive and costly effort to build a navy because in the nineteenth century naval power was a chief index of great power status.When the war with Japan over Korea grew imminent in 1894,British naval officers who had been assisting Li Hung-chang in building the Peiyang fleet hoped that it could give a good account of itself against the modern fleet which other British officers had been helping the Japanese to develop.But by the end of the war in 1895 the Japanese fleet had destroyed the Peiyang fleet.More than anything else,this defeat dramatized imperial China's tragic fail- ure.For half a century afterward China's international fortunes tended on the whole to decline,notably without any attempt again to develop significant naval power. John Rawlinson is well equipped to tell this important story. He began his experience of things Chinese as the son of a distin- guished American missionary editor in Shanghai.After gradua- tion from Oberlin in 1942,he studied Chinese in the United States Navy,and after World War II he served under the American Em- vii