[1][2] It consisted of 11 articles which provided for the termination of China's tributary relations with Korea; required that China pay an indemnity of 200 million taels and cede Taiwan (Formosa), the Penghu (Pescadores) Islands, and the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan; and opened four cities (Shashi, Chongqing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou) to Japan as trading ports.

However, due to the diplomatic Triple Intervention of Russia, Germany, and France just one week after the treaty was signed, the Japanese withdrew their claim to the Liaodong Peninsula in return for an additional war indemnity of 30 million taels from China.

However, Liaodong was subsequently returned to Qing dynasty due to diplomatic intervention of Russia, Germany, and France, which forced Japan to back down and withdraw from the peninsula in the same year.

Imperial Japan was seeking colonies and resources in the Korean Peninsula and mainland China to compete with the presence of Western powers at that time.

This was the way the Japanese leadership chose to illustrate how fast Imperial Japan had advanced compared to the West since the 1867 Meiji Restoration, and the extent it wanted to amend the unequal treaties that were held in the Far East by the Western powers.

By the final stage of the conference, while Li Hongzhang agreed to the transfer of full sovereignty of the Penghu islands and the portion of Liaodong to Imperial Japan, he still refused to hand over Taiwan.

Before the treaty was signed, Li Hongzhang was attacked by a right-wing Japanese extremist on 24 March: he was fired at and wounded on his way back to his lodgings at Injoji temple.

They demanded that Japan withdraw its claim on the Liaodong peninsula, concerned that Lüshun, then called Port Arthur by Westerners, would fall under Japanese control.

At that time, the European powers were not concerned with any of the other conditions, or the free hand Japan had been granted in Korea under the other terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki.

Within two years, Germany, France, and Great Britain had similarly taken advantage of the economic and political opportunities in the weak Chinese Empire (See Scramble for China), each taking control of significant local regions.

The previous decades of the Self-Strengthening Movement were considered to be a failure, and support grew for more radical changes in China's political and social systems which led to Hundred Days' Reform in 1898.

The Triple Intervention is regarded by many Japanese historians as being a crucial historic turning point in Japanese foreign affairs – from this point on, the nationalist, expansionist, and militant elements began to join ranks and steer Japan from a foreign policy based mainly on economic hegemony toward outright imperialism — a case of the coerced turning increasingly to coercion.

Russia wasted little time after the Triple Intervention to move men and materials down into the Liaodong to start building a railroad from both ends — Port Arthur and Harbin, as it already had railway construction in progress across northern Manchuria to shorten the rail route to Russia's principal Pacific Ocean naval base at Vladivostok, a port closed by ice four months of each year.

However, the omission of the geopolitical reality in ignoring the free hand Japan had been granted by the Treaty (of Shimonoseki) with respect to Korea and Taiwan was short-sighted of Russia with respect to its strategic goals; to get to and maintain a strong point in Port Arthur Russia would have to dominate and control many additional hundreds of miles of Eastern Manchuria (the Fengtian province of Imperial China, modern Jilin and Heilongjiang) up to Harbin.

In the immediate fallout of the Triple Intervention, Japanese popular resentment at Russia's deviousness and the perceived weakness of its own government caving in to foreign pressure led to riots in Tokyo.