Weihaiwei, located at the easternmost tip of the Shandong Peninsula, is an important anchorage base of the Qianguo Navy, and together with the brigade as a maintenance base, it guards the gateway to the Bohai Sea. The water surface in the www.biquge.info of the pen "Fun" Pavilion is open, and there is a barrier of Liugong Island at the mouth of the bay, and there are waterways in and out of the north and south of Liugong Island, but the sea surface between the south side of Liugong Island and the land of Weihai Bay is too open, and it is not easy to defend. Worried that the Japanese Navy would use torpedo boat formations to attack in the dark or foggy weather, Ding Yuting immediately set about consolidating the defense of the Weihai base after returning from his first eastern tour. Negotiations were made with the machinery bureaus of Tianjin, Lushun and other places to mobilize various pieces of mines, and in Weihai, lightning protection chains and wooden piles were built to strengthen the defense system at the mouth of the bay. Unexpectedly, these measures were regarded as cowardly behavior by the main battle faction of the Qingliu Dynasty, and in the uproar of public opinion about Ding Yuting's "first rat to move forward, wait and see, and indulge the enemy to play with the enemy", the young Emperor Guangxu was deeply affected.

Previously, Emperor Guangxu was instigated by Weng Shuping, the secretary of the household department, and the constant impeachment of the imperial historians, believing that Ding Yuting used a large number of cruisers of the navy to protect sea routes, focusing on the merchant ships from loss, and that "everyone said that the navy was dedicated to protecting merchant ships from loss, and the rest were not naval affairs", and deliberately dispersed naval forces and "avoided war and protected ships", causing the Japanese navy, which was inferior in strength to Qianguo, to "openly haunt the ocean." He issued an order to reprimand Ding Yuting, asking him to gather ships and form a "large guerrilla team" to find the main force of the Japanese navy for a decisive battle.

Regarding the emperor's brainless accusations and orders, Ding Yuting could only smile bitterly.

Escorting ships was originally an important duty of the navy, and the sea route was the lifeline of the Great Qian Empire, and one-third of the grain in the south was transported to the north by rail, and two-thirds needed to be transported by merchant ships by sea.

And such an obvious fact, Qingliu was able to make the emperor turn a blind eye!

In the face of such a black cauldron, Ding Yuting couldn't argue with the emperor at all, but fortunately, Wang Yikuang of Qingjun, who was now acting in charge of the sea department, helped Ding Yuting go back, Yi Kuang said that "the sea road is the wealth of the imperial court, and there must be no mistakes, and the naval escort is the first priority, not to the wave war", "If you abandon the escort and specialize in attacking the enemy, the sea route will be cut off by the enemy, and the court will have no food and salary, who will be to blame?" This made the Qingliu people temporarily shut up, and they did not dare to make any more criticisms about the navy's escort of "protecting ships", but the accusation of Ding Yuting's "avoiding war" has not been interrupted.

On March 12, the imperial court officially telegraphed Li Shaoquan on the failure of Ding Yuting's tour. On the same day, Li Shaoquan ordered Ding Yuting to lead the fleet on another patrol, and on the other hand, Ding Yuting returned to Weihai in a hurry to explain to the imperial court on the grounds of arranging defense. The imperial court seized the opportunity to make a big fuss about Ding Yuting's arrangement of Weihai's defense, and reprimanded sternly the next day: "According to the previous telegram: Ding Yuting did not meet the Japanese ship, turned back to Weihai, and arranged the defense." Weihai is located in the east, not as pointed out by the enemy, what is the arrangement? Or is this a solid place to hide? He also ordered Li Shaoquan to immediately investigate Ding Yuting's "fearlessness and indulgence with the enemy," and if so, he should be removed as soon as possible.

On 20 March, the Qianguo navy set out on its eastern tour, and the destination was changed from outside the mouth of the Han River to the Taedong River in northern Korea. The main purpose of the Navy's operation was not to search for and destroy weak Japanese warships, but was actually to cooperate with the army to reinforce Pyongyang, to protect the security of the coastal areas, and to prevent the Japanese troops from landing by sea to seize Pyongyang. This move immediately triggered a new round of attacks by the main battle faction of the Qing Dynasty, and "the recent impeachment of the admiral for cowardice and evasion, stealing the life of the arsonists, and almost speaking in unison", can be seen from this the situation in which the Qing faction in the top echelons of the Qing government is very uproar. Li Shaoquan understood that Ding Yuting was carrying out his and Yi Kuang's instructions, giving priority to protecting the ship and avoiding fighting with superior enemy forces, but in the officialdom where there were many political enemies, he had to take advantage of the situation to explain to the imperial court, and on the other hand, he attributed the responsibility to Ding Yuting, severely reprimanded him to deal with it, and asked him to "refresh his spirits, train the soldiers, and make bold contributions."

As Li Shaoquan's descendant, Ding Yuting was well aware of the strength of the Qingliu main battle faction in the imperial court, as well as the dilemma of the position of the old boss at this time, and also understood those surging accusations, ostensibly talking about himself, but the actual intention was to force Li Shaoquan to hand over the navy. But those fiercely worded and even harsh personal attacks will inevitably not leave a negative impact in Ding Yuting's heart. On 27 March, in a letter to Gong Zhaoyu, the general office of the Lushun Dockyard Project, to negotiate ammunition and mines, Ding Yuting made the following statement: "In the navy, there are 40 ships that can go to sea and travel far away, and there must be 40 ships, which seems to be many, and the sea is thousands of miles away, and the sea is dotted with seaports, and the war is all together, and it is necessary to cover up everywhere. Hereby, it seems that with such a vast sea, it is necessary to reduce the division of several ships, not counting the strength, and the battle and defense are all belonging, although those who are absolutely wise will also scratch their heads. After several battles, if the ship needs to be repaired, the recovery force is not replenished. The stock of coal and ordnance is not abundant, and it is hoped that it will be difficult to deal with it. There is no basis for the future, who knows! The matter has come to this point, and the only way to drive this brigade is to search and fight bitterly, dare to say that the merit is the first to slander the masses, and the blunt opportunity is just to listen to the heavens and the sky." There is not only grief and indignation in the face of turbulent discussions, but also a bit of helplessness to resign himself to fate. When a country's former enemy admiral was about to fight and foreign enemies knocked on the door, he was subjected to suspicion, demolition, and even unreasonable slander and abuse by the highest echelons of power, and this was not because of his personal ability, but because the critics wanted to use this to replace the admiralty of the navy, seize the naval power controlled by the Westernists, and weaken the strength of Li Shaoquan, the leader of the Westernists. A war against aggression against foreign countries, which was supposed to be a common hatred of the enemy, unwittingly became a stage of factional struggle and internal friction.

On 28 March, the day after being "reprimanded" by Li Shaoquan, Ding Yuting convened a confidential military meeting in the Liugong Island Naval Office to discuss and formulate a plan of action for the next step.

In order to make good arrangements for the defense of the rear road and enable the main fleet to be liberated, according to the instructions of Yi Kuang and Li Shaoquan, Ding Yuting ordered two coastal defense ironclad ships, "Longwei" and "Pingyuan," to be stationed at the mouth of Dagu in Tianjin to assist the army in defending and consolidating the defense in the Bohai Bay, so as to "ensure that Gyeonggi is safe" On the next day, he led the main ironclad ships "Dingyuan", "Zhenyuan", "Jingyuan", and torpedo cruisers "Jianji", "Jianxun", "Jianye", "Jianzhong", "Jianhong", and "Jianhu", and torpedo gunboats "Jianwei", "Jian'an", "Haikun", and "Haipeng" A total of 15 warships and two torpedo boats, "Fulong" and "Fuhu," went out on patrol again, with the intention of making some gains and eliminating the pretext of the main battle faction of the Qingliu River. Judging from the intentions, they still did not want to engage in a confrontation with the main force of the Japanese Combined Fleet, but wanted to concentrate their superior forces and seek opportunities to annihilate the weak enemy ships, so as to achieve the goal of gradually weakening the Japanese navy. In view of the fact that the Japanese troops were advancing on the front line of Pyongyang and the Taedong River, and that the warships of the Japanese Combined Fleet were also frequently infested, the Qianguo Fleet arrived at the sea off the mouth of the Taedong River on 1 April, but no trace of the Japanese ships was found.

However, what was surprising was that in the early morning of 1 April, the day after the main warships of the Qianguo Fleet sailed out of the Weihai base, there was a great alarm in Weihai Bay, and 29 white Japanese warships appeared outside the bay!

Just as the Qianguo Navy did not go on patrol mainly to find and destroy Japanese warships, the actions of the Japanese Combined Fleet for a long time after the outbreak of war were not as wolf-like and high-spirited as the Japanese people imagined. After the failure of the sneak attack on the Qianguo troop carrier in the Battle of Toshima, the Japanese Combined Fleet adopted a defensive strategy that was slightly similar to that of the Qianguo Navy, and the main force of the entire fleet shrank along the coast of Incheon, Korea, and traveled between the DPRK and Japan, and was busy acting as an escort for the army troop carriers, and did not dare to easily move north to contact the main force of the Qianguo Fleet.

But soon after, the strategy of the Japanese Navy suddenly shifted. In this report, which was mainly aimed at naval strategy, Kotaro Munakata first analyzed the situation of the Qianguo navy and judged that the Qianguo navy "has given up its aggressive strategy and changed it to a retreat strategy," and suggested that the Japanese combined fleet should immediately abandon the idea of defending the coastal waters of Korea and change it to "break into the mouth of the Bohai Sea to test the courage and cowardice of the Qianguo fleet." If he had the courage, he would go out to fight in Weihai and Lushun. If he does not come out, then we can know his cowardice, and if I attack Weihai and Lushun, it will be very disadvantageous, and we should lure them out of the ocean to fight the male and female. "It is an extraordinary coincidence that on 20 March, the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Sukehiro Ito, convened a meeting of the captains of the entire fleet and laid out a plan for attacking Weihai, the naval base of Qianguo. On the morning of 21 July, a torpedo boat unit consisting of six torpedo boats, including "Kitty Hawk," "No. 7," "No. 12," "No. 13," "No. 22," and "No. 23," as well as the "Kuaifeng Maru" torpedo boat supply ship, took the lead in setting off from the anchorage at the mouth of the Daedong River in the DPRK and sailed at high speed to Weihai. Matsushima, Chiyoda, Itsukushima, Hashidate, Yamashiro, Fuso, Yoshino, Naniwa, Takachiho, Akitsusu, Musashi, Kongo, Takao, Katsugi, Tenryu, Akagi, Oshima, Atago, Mubi, Maya, and Chokai, as well as 22 warships of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd guerrillas followed.

At midnight on 21 July, the torpedo boat unit at the vanguard of the Combined Fleet first reached the waters near Chengshantou at the eastern end of the Shandong Peninsula because of its high speed, and then covertly sailed towards the east entrance of Weihai Bay, intending to sneak into Weihai Bay and launch a sneak attack on the Qianguo fleet in the harbor under the cover of night. When the six torpedo boats sailed to the vicinity of Ridao, which was guarding the sea at the east mouth of Weihai Bay, they were discovered by the patrol boats of the Qianguo Navy, and the alarm in the harbor was loud, and rockets rushed into the sky, and the armored cruiser "Chaoyong," which was stationed in the harbor because of a malfunction in the boilers, fired its cannons and opened fire. Amid the sound of artillery fire from the sea and land of Qianguo, the Japanese torpedo boat squadron believed that it had lost the conditions for a sneak attack, feared losses, and returned to the anchorage of Soundproof Island, which was located at 35 degrees 51 minutes north latitude and 126 degrees 91 minutes east longitude.

The warships of the Combined Fleet Group, which had departed after the torpedo boat fleet, arrived in the early morning of the 10th. At 7:03 a.m., the Japanese fleet and the Weihai coastal batteries began to exchange fire, and because they found no trace of the main force of the Qianguo Navy in Weihai Harbor, only "Chaoyong" and a few mosquito boats were seen, and the artillery battle lasted until about 9:30 a.m. The Japanese fleet retreated, firing at too far on both sides, and neither side suffered major losses.

Because the main force of the Qianguo Navy was not at the Weihai base, the Japanese Combined Fleet did not achieve the original goal of luring the Qianguo Fleet out of the port and carrying out a decisive battle with the main force, so it reverted to the operation of escorting the army to land in Korea. The Qingliu people naturally attributed the incident to Ding Yuting's incompetence and concluded that the navy's patrol the day before was to avoid the Japanese fleet, and rumors about the Japanese warships haunting Lushun, Shanhaiguan, and even Dagukou also spread around, and the more strange they became, and for a time the entire coastal area of the Qianguo country was full of soldiers, and the imperial court was shaken by it, and strictly ordered the navy to return immediately and defend the gate of Gyeonggi. On 2 April, the main force of the Qianguo Fleet, which was cruising around Haiyang Island, received a telegram from Li Shaoquan from the customs cruiser "Golden Dragon" and returned to Weihai at 6 a.m. on 3 April.

The scope of the Qianguo fleet's patrol this time was reduced to the Bohai Bay, and the purpose was to eliminate the Japanese warships that had been rumored to be in various ports. The fleet carried out a long patrol in the Miaodao Islands, Qinhuangdao, Shanhaiguan, Lushun, and Dagu areas, during which it also provided escort for the "Tunan" and "Siping" merchant ships that were carrying ordnance and coal from Dagu to Lushun, and it was not until 12 June that they returned to Weihai from Lushun, and the "Jiyuan," "Weiyuan," "Kangji," and "Zhenbian" warships that had been maintained and repaired at the Lushun base also returned.

On the second day after the main force of the Qianguo fleet returned to Weihai, the military aircraft department of the imperial court changed its previous method of commanding Ding Yuting through Yi Kuang and Li Shaoquan, and directly telegraphed Ding Yuting: "...... Weihai, Dalian Bay, Yantai, Lushun and other places are the key passes of the mainland and the gateway to Dagu, and all ships of the navy should patrol back and forth in these places, strictly guard, not far away, do not let a ship enter, if there is negligence, Ding Yuting will be severely punished! ...... "directly issued a strategic order to the navy not to cross the line of Lushun and Weihai, which was even more extreme than the defensive strategy adopted by Li Shaoquan, and with a single telegram, the Qianguo navy was officially locked in the Bohai Bay. It can be seen from this that the Qingliu main battle faction, which influenced the imperial decrees, did not have any understanding and criticism of Yi Kuang and Li Shaoquan's defensive strategy, and the focus of their attack was entirely on replacing the admiral of the navy. After that, the Qingliu people's attack on Ding Yuting did not come to an end, but intensified, to April 15 reached a climax, three imperial historians, squires on the same day to impeach Ding Yuting, the Minister of Military Aircraft Weng Shuping also asked Ding Yuting to be dismissed in the court meeting, the reason was that Ding Yuting caused the defeat of the army in Korea, on the 16th, Emperor Guangxu officially decreed to remove Ding Yuting from the post of naval commander, Qingliu for Li Shaoquan, the political offensive of the Westernist bigwig, achieved initial success.

Li Shaoquan, who was forced into a corner, staged a debate in the Qing court on the 19th, lamenting at length the suffering of the navy, pointing out a series of problems such as the suspension of the purchase of ships and equipment for many years (originally it was two years, but under Weng Shuping's operation, it was actually stopped forever), and at the same time expounded his strategic thinking: "If we are chasing the ocean, the victory or defeat is not known, and in case of setbacks, even if we try to buy them quickly, it is not in a hurry." However, it is not necessary to fight, but it makes the cruising at home and abroad, as a tiger in the mountains, and the Japanese are still afraid of our iron ships, and do not dare to compete lightly. I don't know whether it was influenced by Li Shaoquan's emotionally charged writing, or out of balancing the snobbery of various factions in the imperial court, at the last moment when it was decided that Ding Yuting should stay or go, the Empress Dowager Renxi, who had been ill, actually came forward to inquire about the matter in person, and on May 1, the Qianguo government withdrew its previous order and ordered Ding Yuting to be temporarily exempted from punishment.

At a time when the Qianguo was fighting for factions, forcing the admiral of the former enemy in the cracks, and trapping the navy in the inland sea. Since the outbreak of the Battle of Toshima on 1 March, the Combined Fleet has escorted tens of thousands of Japanese troops to Korea until 12 May. For a time, the Japanese Army, dressed in black uniforms, gathered at Incheon, Busan, Seoul, and other important places, and the situation in Korea deteriorated even more.