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Updated: May 15, 2025
Only two neutral ports came seriously under consideration; Batavia and Padang. At Keeling I had cautiously asked about Tsing-tau, of which I had naturally thought first, and so quite by chance I learned that it had fallen.
Tsing-tau as a seat of deputed government may not have found its way into school-books but the inquisitive traveler in Northeast China readily learns of its existence. Perhaps it is meant to be complimentary to China to retain the name Tsing-tau but that is all about the place that is Chinese, save the coolies executing the white man's behest.
More than once Portugal had to maintain her rights by recourse to arms, but the colony has remained Portuguese without interruption for more than three hundred and fifty years, and is a hoary patriarch beside infantile British Hong Kong and German Tsing-tau. The oldest lighthouse on the coast of China is that of Guia, standing sentinel on the highest point of the Portuguese colony.
The fact that she had sunk an American ship on the high seas opened up still another diplomatic controversy between Germany and the United States, which cannot be treated here. When she left Tsing-tau she took as her crew the men from the German gunboats Tiger and Luchs, and had their four 4.1-inch and some of their one-pounder guns as her armament.
The Germans had spent about $100,000,000 in improving Tsing-tau, the principal city of Kiao-chau, and they had no intention of surrendering. After a siege of two months the city was captured by the Japanese army and navy, assisted by a small force of British troops. This was the first act in the drama.
The small native town of Tsing-tau, admirably situated on the harbor, was adopted by Germany as the seat of government, and all the appurtenances of a military and naval station have there been erected. A look of permanency characterizes every structure. The house of the naval governor is even pretentious.
She brought with her more than 500 persons, 200 of them being her own crew, and the remainder being passengers and crews of French, British, Russian, and American ships that had been her victims in her roving over 30,000 miles of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans since leaving Tsing-tau seven months before.
Having captured Tsing-tau, they presented to the Chinese the famous Twenty-One Demands, which gave the Chinese Question its modern form. These demands, as originally presented in January 1915, consisted of five groups.
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