Strange Chinese Soldiers

"Strange Chinese Soldiers" is a September 1894 satirical print from Kiyochika's Nippon Banzai! series, depicting Qing troops in caricatured fashion as comically inadequate opponents for the modern Japanese military. The "strangeness" of the Qing soldiers — their old-fashioned equipment, their unfamiliar uniforms, their depicted incompetence — served the series' propagandistic function of reassuring Japanese audiences of their military superiority. The print participates in the Meiji period's complex and often contemptuous discourse of Chinese military modernisation.