Chinese General, Ye ZhiZhao, with his Korean Concubine Retreating from the Japanese Army

Chinese General Ye Zhizhao with his Korean Concubine Retreating from the Japanese Army depicts the flight of the Qing commander Ye Zhichao after the early Japanese victories at Songhwan and Asan in July 1894. The episode supplied Meiji senso-e designers with a subject that combined military reportage with a strain of moralising narrative about the Qing officer corps, and prints of Ye's retreat circulated alongside the more triumphal battle prints of the campaign. Migita Toshihide's contribution, held in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and accessible through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, belongs to that group. As a Yoshitoshi student, Toshihide had been trained to compose around a small group of figures moving across a charged landscape, and the design here typically arranges Ye and his companion in a horizontal traverse, with broken terrain or fragmented baggage suggesting the conditions of the retreat. Meiji prints of this episode tended to highlight the contrast between the orderly Japanese pursuit and the disordered Qing flight, but Toshihide's handling avoids the broader caricature visible in some of his contemporaries' versions. The print belongs to the wider Songhwan-Asan group within his Sino-Japanese War output and pairs naturally with his sheets depicting the Japanese infantry's first land victory, giving the viewer the two sides of the same campaign event.