The war room at the Port Arthur naval base was a place of ghosts. The ghost of the defeated Gongzi Army, whose demise was the talk of every soldier in the garrison. The ghost of General Wei's arrogance, which now served as a cautionary tale. And most potently, the ghost of the Emperor's wrath, which lingered in the air like the smell of ozone after a lightning strike. The atmosphere was nothing like the councils in Beijing. There was no debate, no cautious advice, no jockeying for position. There was only the cold, heavy weight of absolute authority.
The senior commanders of the Second Army and the Beiyang Fleet stood ramrod straight around the massive chart table, their faces pale, their eyes fixed on the map before them. They had all just come from the parade ground, the sharp crack of the execution volleys still ringing in their ears. They avoided looking at the small, slender figure of the Emperor who stood at the head of the table, yet his presence was an immense gravitational force that pulled all thought and attention toward him.
Qin Shi Huang let the silence stretch, forcing them to stew in their fear. He wanted them off-balance, stripped of their old assumptions, their minds wiped clean and ready to receive his new doctrine. Finally, he spoke, his voice calm but carrying the chilling finality of a blade striking stone.
"The previous strategy," he began, gesturing dismissively at the map of Korea, "a limited landing to expel the Japanese from a tributary state, is now void. It was a strategy designed for a war against an arrogant fool. Thanks to the incompetence of General Wei, we are no longer fighting that war. We are now fighting a war against a wounded, enraged tiger. A new strategy is required."
Admiral Ding Ruchang, commander of the victorious Beiyang Fleet, was the first brave enough to speak, though his voice was hesitant. "Your Majesty, my fleet stands ready. We can establish a full blockade of the Korean coast. We can cut off their supply lines to the Japanese forces now occupying Pyongyang. We can starve them out."
"Blockade?" QSH said the word as if it were an insult. "You are thinking too small, Admiral. A blockade is a siege. It is slow. It is passive. It is the strategy of a man who wishes to wait for his enemy to die of sickness. I am not interested in starving them out. I am interested in annihilating them."
He moved from his position at the head of the table, his movements fluid and precise. He walked along the side, his gaze sweeping over his terrified commanders.
"We will ignore Pyongyang for now," he declared, tapping the captured city on the map. "Let them have it. Let them fortify it. Let them stretch their supply lines thin across the Yellow Sea. Let them grow comfortable in their captured city, believing they have won the land war." He then moved his hand away from the Korean peninsula, his finger hovering over the vast, empty expanse of the sea. "Our target is not a city. It is not their army. It is their navy."
He stopped directly in front of Admiral Ding. "Admiral, you will take the entire Beiyang Fleet—every battleship, every cruiser, every torpedo boat—and you will sail. Not for Korea, but for the heart of the enemy. You will steam directly into the Yellow Sea, and you will seek a decisive, final battle with the Japanese Combined Fleet. You will force this engagement."
Admiral Ding's face went pale. This was a far cry from ambushing helpless transports. "A decisive battle, Your Majesty? The entire Combined Fleet? Their main force is formidable. They have cruisers like the Yoshino that are faster than any ship we possess. A full fleet engagement is incredibly risky… If we were to lose…"
"Risk is the currency of victory, Admiral," QSH cut him off, his voice turning to ice. "And you will not lose. You will not just engage them. You will destroy them." He leaned closer, his eyes boring into the admiral's. "I have reviewed the schematics of their cruisers, a courtesy of our German engineers. Their vaunted rapid-fire guns are mounted in open casemates with little to no armor protection. They have sacrificed armor for speed. A fool's bargain."
His voice became a low, intense lecture on naval tactics. "Our battleships, the Dingyuan and the Zhenyuan, will weather their fire. You will advance in a line-abreast formation to maximize your forward firepower and minimize your profile. You will use my two ironclads as an anvil. You will charge directly at their center. While their fleet is in chaos, attempting to deal with the battleships, your faster cruisers will act as a hammer, swinging around their flanks and tearing their unarmored ships to pieces with our new steel shells. You will crush them. That is an order, not a suggestion."
Admiral Ding swallowed hard, a bead of sweat tracing a path down his temple. The plan was terrifyingly aggressive, but the logic was sound. He bowed his head. "It will be done, Your Majesty."
QSH then turned to the trembling land commanders, the men of the Second Army. "While the navy is clearing the sea of Japanese filth, you will prepare for a new landing. But we will not be reinforcing failure in Pyongyang. We will not land in Korea to slog through a long and costly land campaign. We will land here."
His finger stabbed down on the map, not on Korea, but on the coastline of the Liaodong Peninsula itself, just a short distance from where they now stood.
One of the generals, a man named Song Qing, looked up in utter confusion. "Invade… our own territory, Your Majesty?"
"No, General," QSH said, a cruel smile touching his lips for the first time. "We will not be invading. We will be staging. We will let the main Japanese army, fifty thousand strong, exhaust itself occupying northern Korea. We will let them march and starve and freeze in the coming winter. And then, under my direct command, with the sea lanes completely secure, we will launch our own invasion."
The generals exchanged confused glances. An invasion of what?
QSH's finger slid across the map, across the Yellow Sea, and came to rest directly on the Japanese home islands.
"We will launch an invasion of Japan itself," he stated, his voice calm, as if he were discussing a minor border skirmish. "Once their fleet is at the bottom of the sea, we will use our merchant marine and transport fleet to land an army on their shores. We will not bother with Tokyo. We will land at Nagasaki. We will take the war to their fields, their cities, their homes. We will burn Nagasaki to the ground as a message to their Meiji Emperor. We will show him, and the entire world, what it truly means to invite the wrath of the Dragon onto your own soil."
A stunned, horrified silence filled the room. The commanders stared at their Emperor as if seeing him for the first time. They had been prepared for a limited, regional war over a tributary state. He was now proposing a total war of annihilation, a punitive expedition aimed at the Japanese homeland itself. The sheer scale of his ambition, the breathtaking ruthlessness of his strategy, was beyond anything they had ever conceived.
"This is not a war for Korea anymore," QSH concluded, his gaze sweeping over their stunned faces. "This is a war to determine who is the undisputed master of Asia. In such a war, there are no half-measures. There is no retreat. There is only the utter subjugation of our enemy."
He turned and walked back to the head of the table. "Now, go. Prepare your men and your ships. You have your orders."
As the commanders filed out of the room, their minds reeling, their fear of the Emperor now mingled with a terrifying awe, Li Hongzhang, who had been observing from the corner, looked at the boy standing before the great map. His small frame was illuminated by the flickering gas lamps of the war room, but the shadow he cast seemed vast and ancient. Li Hongzhang realized with a profound and chilling certainty that he was not just serving a brilliant Emperor. He was serving a true conqueror, a force of nature whose ambition would not stop at the shores of Japan, but would continue to spread until the entire world was his.