was the lead ship of her class of two protected cruisers built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the 1880s. As Japan lacked the industrial capacity to construct such vessels, the ship was designed and built in the United Kingdom. She participated in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, playing a major role in the Battle of the Yalu River and lesser roles in the Battles of Port Arthur, Weihaiwei, the Pescadores Campaign and the invasion of Taiwan. Naniwa played a minor role in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 where she participated in the Battle of Chemulpo Bay, briefly helped to blockade Port Arthur at the beginning of the war, helped to sink a Russian armored cruiser during Battle off Ulsan and participated in the climactic defeat of the Imperial Russian Navy in the Battle of Tsushima. After the war the ship was relegated to auxiliary roles and served as a survey and fisheries protection ship. Naniwa ran aground in the Kurile Islands north of the Japanese Home Islands in 1912 and could not be refloated before she was permanently wrecked a month later. Salvage rights to the wreck were sold a year later. Design and description The Naniwa-class cruisers were designed by Armstrong Mitchell's chief naval architect, William White, as improved versions of the pioneering Chilean protected cruiser (later purchased by the IJN and renamed Izumi) and the Royal Navy's equivalent ships. When completed, Naniwa and her sister ship, , were considered the most advanced and most powerful cruisers in the world. The cruisers displaced at normal load. The ships had a length between perpendiculars of and an overall length of , a beam of and a draft of at deep load. The cruisers were fitted with a plough-shaped naval ram of mild steel below the waterline and had a partial double bottom extending between the forward and aft magazines. They were powered by a pair of horizontal, two-cylinder double-expansion steam engines, each driving one shaft using steam produced by six cylindrical boilers. The engines were designed to produce a total of with forced draught to give the ships a maximum speed of . During her speed trials, Naniwa reached a speed of from . The Naniwa-class cruisers carried enough coal to gave them a range of about at a speed of . The ship's crew consisted of 338 officers and men. The main armament of the Naniwa-class