Japanese troop landing at Rongcheng Bay

This woodblock print documents the Japanese amphibious landing at Rongcheng Bay (Rongchengwan) on the Shandong Peninsula in January 1895 during the First Sino-Japanese War. The landing was part of the strategic encirclement of Weihaiwei, the northern Chinese naval base housing the Beiyang Fleet. Kiyochika's composition likely depicts warships standing offshore while landing craft carry infantry through surf onto a beach, rendered with the atmospheric handling of sea-surface light that characterizes his most accomplished battle prints. The oban-format horizontal field accommodates both the panoramic sweep of the bay and the concentrated activity at the waterline. Such amphibious landing scenes required the artist to coordinate multiple pictorial registers — distant fleet, middle-ground boats, foreground soldiers — in a manner that demonstrates the compositional ambition distinguishing Kiyochika's battle series from more schematic war prints of the period.