Jingyuan was 268 feet long, with a 38-foot beam and a crew of 204 to 260 men. Her compound-expansion steam engine, driving two screws through four boilers, produced 6,850 indicated horsepower and a top speed of 18.5 knots. The main armament consisted of three breech-loading 8-inch Krupp guns -- two paired on a hydraulic rotating platform forward and one on a manual mount at the stern -- supplemented by two 6-inch Armstrong guns on sponsons, eight 6-pounder Hotchkiss guns, and six Gatling guns. She carried four torpedo tubes, two forward and two aft, the rear pair activated electrically from the captain's cabin. An internal armored deck, 4 inches thick on the slopes and 3 inches flat, provided protection against plunging fire.

Both cruisers, along with two armored cruisers and a torpedo boat, gathered in the Solent near Portsmouth in August 1887 for inspection by Li Hongzhang. Admiral William M. Lang, a former Royal Navy officer serving the Chinese government, took command of the squadron for the voyage to China. After a delayed departure on September 12 due to a lost anchor and repairs, the ships arrived at Amoy in November and joined the Beiyang Fleet in Shanghai the following spring. Jingyuan was repainted in 1888 from her original grey to the Victorian-era scheme of black hull, white superstructure, and buff funnels. By 1889, she was based at Weihaiwei, and that summer she sailed with Admiral Ding Ruchang's flotilla to Yantai, Incheon, Vladivostok, and Busan.

On September 17, 1894, Jingyuan fought at the Battle of the Yalu River, the first major naval engagement of the First Sino-Japanese War. The Chinese fleet operated in paired formations after Admiral Ding Ruchang's flagship lost its signal mast early in the fighting, leaving each pair of ships to operate without central coordination. Jingyuan was grouped with the armored cruiser Laiyuan. While they did not face the heaviest Japanese fire, both ships caught fire during the engagement. Jingyuan's sister ship Zhiyuen was sunk -- one of five Chinese vessels lost that day. The surviving ships, including Jingyuan, retreated to Port Arthur for repairs before relocating to Weihaiwei in October.

At Weihaiwei, the fleet that had once been the pride of China's modernization found itself trapped. When Japanese forces captured the shore fortifications in late January 1895, the Beiyang Fleet came under bombardment from its own guns, turned against it by the enemy. By night, Japanese torpedo boats slipped through the harbor defenses for repeated attacks. On the night of February 5, Jingyuan's partner Laiyuan was torpedoed and capsized. Four days later, on February 9, Jingyuan herself was hit below the waterline by a shell fired from one of the captured Chinese forts. She sank upright in the shallow harbor waters.

Rather than allow Jingyuan to be captured and turned against China as the forts had been, Admiral Ding Ruchang ordered a naval mine placed beneath her decks and detonated. The explosion ensured that the enemy would not add a British-built, Chinese-crewed protected cruiser to the Imperial Japanese Navy's growing fleet. Ding himself would soon follow a similar path: after declining Japanese offers of asylum, he took his own life rather than surrender. Jingyuan was raised and scrapped the following year. She had been commissioned in 1887 and destroyed in 1895 -- eight years in which a ship built on the Tyne to the highest standards of Victorian engineering became a casualty of the collision between China's modernizing ambitions and the military realities of the late 19th century.