Dingyuan-class ironclad

The Dingyuan class  was a pair of ironclads built for the Imperial Chinese Beiyang Fleet in the 1880s. As China lacked the technology and capability to construct its own armoured warships, they were ordered from Imperial Germany. Although they were completed in 1883–1884, they were not delivered until after the conclusion of the Sino-French War in 1885.

Design
Naval conflicts with Western powers earlier in the 19th century, during which European warships decisively defeated China's traditional junk fleets, prompted a major rearmament program that began in the 1880s under the viceroy Li Hongzhang. Advisers from the British Royal Navy assisted the program, and the first group of ships&mdash;several ironclad gunboats and two small cruisers&mdash;were bought from British shipyards. Following a dispute with Japan over the island of Formosa, the Chinese Navy decided to buy large ironclad battleships to match the Japanese ironclads of the JAPANESE IRONCLAD Fusō and es then under construction. Britain was unwilling to sell China warships of this size, so Hongzhang turned to German shipyards.

The German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) was completing the four s, and offered to sell China ships built to a modified design. Hongzhang wanted to buy up to twelve of the ironclads, but tight finances prevented an order of more than two ships, along with a protected cruiser. Rather than mounting the main guns in a pair of large, open barbettes as in the Sachsen class, the new design placed four guns in two rotating barbettes forward.

General characteristics
The ships of the Dingyuan class were 91 m long between perpendiculars and 93.9 m long overall. They had a beam of 18.3 m and a draught of 6.1 m. The ships displaced 7144 LT as designed and up to 7670 LT at full load. The ships' hulls were constructed with steel and were built with a ram in the bow. Steering was controlled by a single rudder. Each vessel had a crew of 363 officers and enlisted men. Two heavy military masts were fitted, one just forward of the main battery guns and one aft. A hurricane deck covered the turrets and ran from the foremast to the funnels. Each ship carried a pair of second-class torpedo boats astern of the funnels, along with derricks to unload the boats.

Machinery
Dingyuan and Zhenyuen were powered by a pair of horizontal, three-cylinder trunk steam engines, each of which drove a single screw propeller. Steam was provided by eight cylindrical boilers that were ducted into a pair of funnels amidships. The boilers were divided into four boiler rooms. The engines were rated at 6000 ihp for a top speed of 14.5 kn, though both ships exceeded these figures on trials, with Zhenyuen, the faster of the two, reaching 7200 ihp and 15.4 kn. The ships carried 700 LT of coal normally and up to 1000 LT; this enabled a cruising radius of 4500 nmi at a speed of 10 kn. Both ships were fitted with sails for the voyage from Germany to China, though they were later removed.

Armament
The ships were armed with a main battery of four 305 mm 25-caliber guns, mounted in two barbettes en echelon. The barbettes are sometimes reported to have been order reverse, but both ships' guns were arranged identically, with the starboard barbette forward of the port one. The guns themselves were 31.5 LT weapons built by Krupp. The secondary battery consisted of two 150 mm guns mounted individually, one on the bow and the other on the stern. Three 356 mm torpedo tubes rounded out the armament; one was mounted in the stern, and the other two were placed forward of the main battery, all above water.

Service history
Completed in early 1883 and 1884, respectively, Dingyuan and Zhenyuen were to be sailed to China by a German crew, but delays&mdash;primarily from France following the outbreak of the Sino-French War in 1884&mdash;kept the ships in Germany. After the war ended in April 1885, the two ironclads were permitted to depart for China, along with the cruiser CHINESE CRUISER Zhiyuan that had also been built in Germany. The three ships arrived in China in October and they were formally commissioned into the Beiyang Fleet.