Bivouac after Landing at Yungcheng Bay (Eijōwan jōrikugo no roei)

This 1895 [triptych](/glossary/triptych) by Shinohara Kiyooki, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession sc131918, object 129950), depicts the Japanese army's bivouac after landing at Yungcheng (Rongcheng) Bay on the Shandong Peninsula in January 1895. The landing was the staging operation for the overland assault on Weihaiwei, the Qing dynasty's principal naval base on the Yellow Sea and home of the Beiyang Fleet, and the subsequent Battle of Weihaiwei in February 1895 effectively ended Chinese resistance in the First Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese title Eijōwan jōrikugo no roei ("bivouac after landing at Yungcheng Bay") locates the scene at the moment when the landing force had secured the beach and was establishing its forward camp before the march on Weihaiwei. Kiyooki's panoramic triptych composition treats the bivouac as a vast crowd scene with tents, signal flags, supply wagons, and infantry assembled across the three sheets, in the dense-detail format that defined late-Meiji war prints. The print is one of three Sino-Japanese War triptychs by Kiyooki at the MFA dating from the 1894-1895 campaign and is a major surviving record of his treatment of the war's closing operations.