Japanese aggression 120 years ago published

A Chinese state-run historical archive on Friday published over 4,500 wartime papers which documented Japan's military aggression against China in 1894.

The documents, published by the First Historical Archives of China, included imperial edicts of China's Qing Empire (1644-1911), ministers' memorials and government telegraphs.

This is the largest single compilation of wartime records of the first Sino-Japanese War, also known as the Jiawu War, in China.

On July 25, 1894, Japanese warships attacked two Chinese vessels off the Korean port of Asan. At the time, Korea was a tributary of the Qing Empire (1644-1911). By March 1895, the Chinese land army and navy were beaten, the first time China had lost to Japan in a military conflict.

The Shimonoseki Treaty, signed to conclude the war, ceded Liaodong Peninsula in northeast China, Taiwan and its annex the nearby Penghu Islands, to Japan. The Qing court also paid Japan 200 million taels of silver (5.2 billion U.S. dollars today).

The documents included a telegraph sent in 1894 to the Qing court by Li Hongzhang, founder of the Qing Empire's Beiyang Fleet and representative of the Qing court to sign the treaty, which told of a massacre carried out by Japanese forces in Lushun, now a district of Dalian City in Liaoning Province.

According to the telegraph, "Around 2,600 or 2,700 civilians were killed in the streets of Lushun and later buried in huge pits. Even more soldiers and civilians were killed in the mountainous areas and left unburied."