Why did a Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 shock the world?

In 1905 Japan won the first major military victory of the modern era by an Asian power over a European nation. Russia's Baltic Fleet sailed halfway round the world only to be destroyed by a country that had been modernising only since 1868. International observers were surprised, and people living under colonial rule across Asia took note.

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan had set out to absorb Western ideas, technology and ways of warfare. The two empires clashed over Manchuria and Korea. Japan opened the war in February 1904 with a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, and then defeated the Russians on land at Mukden, where they suffered an estimated 90,000 casualties.

The decisive blow came at sea. Russia's Baltic Fleet sailed for seven months and 18,000 nautical miles to reach the war zone, only to be destroyed in the Tsushima Strait in May 1905. The Russians lost eight battleships and more than 5,000 men, while Japan lost 116.

The shock travelled far. China's Sun Yat-sen said the Chinese regarded the Japanese victory as their own, and a young Jawaharlal Nehru in British India felt the sense of inferiority lift. Inside Russia, the humiliation fed the unrest of the 1905 revolution. Inside Japan, the mood was bitter: the peace terms, mediated by the American president Theodore Roosevelt, were far more restrained than the public expected, and riots broke out in Tokyo.

The war made Japan a great power, but it also set the stage for what came next, because the peace treaty recognised Japanese interests in Korea, which Japan annexed five years later.