Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese war of 1904 to 1905 was the first time in the modern era that an Asian power defeated a European empire. The dispute was over Manchuria and Korea: Russia had taken the Liaodong peninsula and the warm-water port of Port Arthur in 1898, and Japan, freshly victorious over China in 1895, wanted recognition of its interests in Korea. When negotiations stalled, Japanese torpedo boats attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur on 8 February 1904 without a declaration of war. The armies fought in Manchuria through the summer of 1905; at Mukden a quarter of a million men on each side fought for a week, and the Russian Baltic fleet sailed halfway round the world only to be destroyed in the Tsushima strait in May 1905. The treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt, gave Japan the Liaodong, the railway in southern Manchuria and the south of Sakhalin. Russia was humiliated but not broken, and the war accelerated revolution at home, while Japan gained an empire it would overreach in 1941. Roosevelt became the first American to win the Nobel peace prize for the mediation. Port Arthur was renamed Lushun, and the railway became the focus of rival ambitions in Manchuria.