Chihaya was based on previous designs for dispatch vessels made by the French military advisor Emile Bertin, and was built in Japan by the Yokosuka Naval Arsenal.

Due to her small size she is sometimes classified as a corvette or gunboat, but was used by the Imperial Japanese Navy primarily as an aviso (dispatch boat) for scouting, reconnaissance and delivery of his priority messages.

Similar in design to Yaeyama and Miyako, Chihaya had a steel hull, and retained a full barque rigging with two masts for auxiliary sail propulsion in addition to her steam engine, which was 2-shaft reciprocating vertical triple-expansion engine with 6 cylindrical Normand boilers driving two shafts and developing 6,000 ihp (4,500 kW).

[3] On the afternoon of 18 June 1901 while still on trials before formal commissioning, Chiyaha collided off Tateyama, Chiba with the destroyer Akebono, which was on a torpedo training exercise.

As this latter battle, Chiyaha commanded a squadron of destroyers which sank the Russian battleship Knyaz Suvorov and repair ship Kamchatka.