Miyako holds a quiet distinction in Japanese naval history: she was the first warship produced by the new Kure Naval Arsenal. Named for the Miyako Islands in the Okinawa chain, she was laid down on 26 May 1894, launched on 27 October 1898, and completed on 31 March 1899. Her steel hull retained two masts for auxiliary sail propulsion alongside her steam engine, a hedge against the uncertainties of mechanical power in the open Pacific. Her armament was modest by the standards of the day: two QF 4.7-inch guns and eight QF 3-pounder Hotchkiss guns, plus two deck-mounted torpedoes. What she lacked in firepower, she made up in speed, fulfilling Bertin's conviction that a warship's survival depended on its ability to avoid being hit rather than to absorb punishment.

Bertin's influence on the Imperial Japanese Navy ran deep. The Jeune Ecole, or "Young School," argued that smaller, faster vessels armed with torpedoes could neutralize the expensive battleships that traditional naval doctrine demanded. Miyako was a physical embodiment of this argument, similar in design to the French unprotected cruiser Milan. The Imperial Japanese Navy used her primarily as an aviso, a dispatch boat tasked with scouting, reconnaissance, and delivering high-priority messages. In this role, speed mattered more than staying power. She arrived too late for the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, but the conflict that would test her was already taking shape in the diplomatic tensions between Japan and Russia over Manchuria and Korea.

When the Russo-Japanese War erupted in 1904, Miyako sailed into action under Commander Tochinai Sojiro. She participated in the naval Battle of Port Arthur and joined the subsequent blockade of that Russian stronghold. Her speed and shallow draft made her useful for close-in reconnaissance work, the kind of surveying that larger warships could not risk. On the night of 14 May 1904, Miyako was engaged in exactly this kind of mission, probing Dairen Harbor to find a suitable landing place for the Imperial Japanese Army's 2nd Army. The harbor approaches, however, had been seeded with Russian mines.

The mine struck without warning. Miyako, with her light construction and minimal armor, had no capacity to absorb such damage. She sank within minutes, taking two crewmen with her. The rest of the crew survived, pulled from the dark waters of the harbor they had been charting. It was an anticlimactic end for a ship that had been built to prove a theory about the future of naval warfare. She was officially struck from the navy list on 21 May 1905. Her wreckage was raised the following year and sold for scrap on 4 July 1906. The Jeune Ecole philosophy she embodied would itself prove only partially correct: speed mattered, but so did the ability to survive a single unlucky blow. Modern Dalian has grown over the harbor where Miyako went down, and the waters that swallowed her now serve one of China's busiest commercial ports.