Old wounds

A Dec 1, 1894, issue of The Illustrated London News features a sketch of the Chinese fleet docked at Port Arthur (now known as Port Lushun).

Despite some restrictions, Japan allowed foreign journalists to be embedded in their troops. They hired a New York Tribune journalist, Edward House, to be their media adviser, and organized many publicity campaigns.

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In contrast, the Qing officials not only underestimated the power of the media, but also attempted to block the news of their failures on the battlegrounds.

One of the rare newspaper pieces Tian collected is the front page of the erstwhile The New York World from its edition dated Dec 20, 1894, which published a damning report by American journalist James Creelman on the Port Arthur Massacre carried out by the Japanese.

Port Lushun, known as Port Arthur at the time, is on the coast of Liaoning province in northeastern China.

"The struggle for the emancipation of Corea (Korea) is suddenly turned into a headlong, savage war of conquest. It is no longer a conflict between civilization and barbarism. Japan has dropped her mask and for the last four days she has trampled civilization under the feet of her conquering army," Creelman wrote in his lead story.

But the silence on the part of the Qing rulers on the massacre and Japanese efforts to bury the truth raised doubts about the credibility of the report and allowed Japan to be free from blame for at least some time.

Tian says: "These newspapers influenced Western society's opinion of Asia, and to some extent, Western decision-makers. That's one of the main reasons why we started this study."

The idea of compiling the news reports into a book first came to Tian when he was covering the 2012 London Olympics for a Chinese TV channel. As a collector of old newspapers, he found a bundle of The Illustrated London News that carried reports about China from the Qing Dynasty era when he was strolling down Portobello Road to take a look at London's famous antique market.

He brought back to China about 100 old British newspapers, and quickly found a group of friends who shared the same passion in unearthing reports of the war from such papers.

For the past two years, Tian and his friends rummaged through war-related news material from book dealers and universities. Besides English newspapers, they also bought French, Russian and Japanese ones from sellers of old publications.

"Studying the newspapers was like going back through a time tunnel," says Tian. "We are not historians, so we didn't provide any commentary in our book. We want readers to make their own conclusions."