[citation needed] The creation of the Beiyang Fleet dated back to 1871, when four ships from the southern provinces were shifted north to patrol the northern waters.

[1] Because of the lack of funding, the training of the fleet and personnel essentially came to a standstill, which eventually contributed to its defeat in the Battle of the Yalu River against Japan.

[2] Prior to 1888 the budget of the Beiyang fleet was two million taels however in 1888 the Beiyang fleet was formally subordinated to the Navy Yamen (the Qing equivalent to a naval ministry) this saw the budget reduced to 1.3 million taels and in 1891 the Hubu recommended against the purchasing of large guns for the navy and in favour of the reduction of naval personnel, this made any effort of modernisation or even maintenance extremely difficult and meant that many of the Chinese ships went into action in the first Sino-Japanese war in a state of disrepair and unmodernised.

[5] Other foreign officers hired include:[6] The Fuzhou academy in the Fuzhou arsenal established in 1866 produced many naval officers which Li hired for the Beiyang navy however the academy also had to provide officers for the other three fleets and with the academy producing only 630 cadets over a 14-year period this was insufficient and Li established the Beiyang naval college in 1880 which produced 300 cadets within the same 14-year period however Fuzhou graduates still composed the majority of the graduates in the fleet.

Port Arthur was of particular importance that the Navy Regulations stipulated half the year must be spent there by senior officers of the fleet.

[11] The Beiyang Fleet took good care to stay out of range of Admiral Amédée Courbet's Far East Squadron during the Sino-French War (August 1884 – April 1885).

The Beiyang Fleet was due to take delivery in early 1884 of Dingyuan, Jiyuan and Zhenyuan, three modern warships then building in German shipyards.

[12] In late June 1884, when the news of the Bắc Lệ ambush broke, the French admiral Sébastien Lespès, commander of the Far East naval division, was cruising off Che-foo in the Gulf of Petchili with the French warships La Galissonnière, Triomphante, Volta and Lutin, while the Beiyang Fleet lay at anchor in Che-foo harbour.

Although war was clearly imminent, France and China remained technically at peace, and Lespès was forbidden to attack the Beiyang Fleet pending the outcome of diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis.

The two ships set sail for Shanghai to join the Nanyang vessels, but were almost immediately recalled by Li Hongzhang, who claimed that they were needed to watch the Japanese in Korea.

The cruisers Chaoyong (超勇) and Yangwei (揚威), which joined the fleet in 1881 and which Li Hongzhang prudently kept far from the scene of action during the Sino-French War, were products of Laird's yard, Birkenhead.

Another pair of protected cruisers, Chingyuan (靖遠) and Zhiyuan (致遠), were built by Armstrong Whitworth at its new Elswick yard in 1887.

These cruisers were fast (25 knots) and heavily armed, but were not adopted by the Royal Navy because the Admiralty considered them to be "weak in structure".

(So were the Japanese Elswick CruisersYoshino and Takasago during the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, though not for the design reasons – the first was accidentally rammed, and the second struck a mine and blew up.)

These foreign-built ships were joined in 1889 by the armoured cruiser Pingyuan, a product of the Foochow Navy Yard originally named Longwei (Lung-wei, 龍威).

The marines saw action following the First Sino-Japanese War when it attempted to retake Nanbang Fort (南幫炮台) after it was attacked by Japanese forces on Christmas day of 1895 and fell on December 29 1895.

Due to the lack of government funding and the intensive Japanese naval program, Beiyang's once superior resources were becoming outdated.