The centuries — millennia even, China was the dominant power in the East, and Japan was mostly inward-focused, isolated, tending only to its own affairs. Then all of a sudden Commodore Matthew Perry’s imposing black warships showed up at Tokyo Harbor and opened up Japan to the West. Humiliated at their underdevelopment in relation to the U.S. and Europe, Japan embarked on a massive modernization campaign and began to flex its newfound muscle in the area. Its first focus was the Korean peninsula, a protectorate of China that  one of the Western generals suggested was a “dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.”

On this day, April 17, in 1895 the first Sino-Japanese war ended with a defeated China signing the Treaty of Shimonoseki. The treaty recognized the independence of Korea and renounced all Chinese claims to the territory. It also ceded to Japan what today is the southern part of the Liaoning province, and the islands of Taiwan and Penghu.

The regional war did not concern the Western powers much, except for the Japanese gain of Liaoning, which Russia wanted for itself. A Russia-brokered Triple Intervention convinced Japan to give up the peninsula, which Russia promptly leased and militarized. Port Arthur would become a flashpoint for Russo-Japanese conflict throughout the first half of the 20th century.