A Study On The Coast Defence Funds Before The Sino-Japanese War

The coast defence funds was set up specially to develop the modern navy in the late Qing Dynasty. This text introduces the evolution of the coast defence funds and analyses the cause of the insufficience of the coast defence funds.First,some assistant funds such as Shan-xiang etc, reduced the amount of Sicheng duty which Yuehai customhouse and the like could refer as the coast defence funds .Second, owing to the unbalanced finance, the provinces such as Jiangsu etc and Yuehai customhouse defaulted much money. Third, the government impropriated a lot of the defence funds. In contrast to the traditional viewpoint, this text thought that the impropriated coast defence funds was mainly used to train the land forces after the Navy Yamun was set up.The payments deficit of the coast defence funds affected the normal development of the modern navy and raising out of the coast defence funds to buy warships had become the main approach to develop the navy, which was at last established by《the north ocean navy's rules》. The influence of raising money provisionally out of the coast defence funds to buy warships was finite and the slow development of the Qing navy was inevitable.