By late 1894, Japan's military campaign through Korea and into Manchuria had gathered unstoppable momentum. Victories at Asan and Pyongyang in September cleared the peninsula, and the Japanese Navy's devastating blow to China's Beiyang Fleet at the Battle of the Yalu River removed the last obstacle at sea. Port Arthur, headquarters of the Beiyang Fleet and a heavily fortified city on the Liaodong Peninsula, was the strategic prize. Marshal Oyama Iwao's Second Army advanced overland while the navy tightened its grip by sea. As the First Division under General Yamaji Motoharu closed in, retreating Chinese forces and desperate civilians fled westward. What the advancing Japanese troops found when they reached abandoned positions on November 18 set the stage for what followed: their wounded comrades had been mutilated, with hands and feet cut off. Some had been burned alive. The Qing government had placed bounties on prisoners of war and their body parts, and Chinese soldiers had displayed mutilated Japanese remains at the city's entrance.

Beginning on November 21, 1894, elements of the Japanese First Division entered Port Arthur and the killing began. The scale remains debated to this day. A scouting report sent to Viceroy Li Hongzhang estimated 2,600 to 2,700 civilians killed within the city walls alone. Creelman, who witnessed the aftermath, asserted that as many as 60,000 people died, with only 36 spared. Other witnesses described streets strewn with hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies, and more floating in the harbor. The killing did not distinguish between soldiers and the people who had been unable to flee: families, the elderly, anyone caught in the path of troops whose fury had been stoked by the mutilation of their comrades. Whatever the precise number, the human toll was staggering, and the dead were never officially counted.

Foreign correspondents in the city had to wait until they left Japanese-controlled territory before filing their dispatches. At first, the world barely noticed: a single sentence in The Times on November 26 noted that "great slaughter is reported to have taken place." Creelman's front-page account in the New York World changed that. Other newspapers followed with detailed reports, and the diplomatic damage was immediate. Japan had spent decades cultivating an image as a modernizing power, and was in the midst of renegotiating the unequal treaties imposed on it in the 1850s. The massacre threatened all of that. Japanese foreign minister Mutsu Munemitsu announced an investigation and promised press freedom, while the Foreign Ministry dismissed the reports as exaggerations. The Japanese press largely avoided the subject or attacked Western journalists. The Japan Weekly Mail was a notable exception, publishing several articles castigating the army. The promised inquiry produced no punishments.

China's Qing government had its own reasons to suppress the truth. Domestic instability made admitting the loss of Port Arthur politically dangerous, so officials sent telegrams across the empire insisting the reports were enemy propaganda and that the city was still held by 30,000 brave soldiers. A month after the fall, many Chinese government officials still did not know Port Arthur had been taken. The pro-Japanese North-China Herald attempted to excuse the massacre by arguing that the circumstances "might have taxed the control of any invading force." The incident colored Western perceptions of Japan for decades, contributing to anti-Japanese sentiment in North America that would persist through World War II. In the aftermath, Imperial Russia established its own colonial and naval presence at Port Arthur, setting the stage for the Russo-Japanese War a decade later.

The city once known to the world as Port Arthur is now the Lushunkou District of Dalian, a busy port on China's Liaoning coast. The harbor that witnessed the massacre still opens onto the Yellow Sea, but the fortifications that made this place so strategically vital have given way to commercial shipping lanes and urban development. The site carries its history quietly. For China, Port Arthur became a symbol of national humiliation during a century of foreign incursion. For Japan, the massacre marked an early stain on military conduct that would recur in conflicts to come. The people who died here in November 1894 left no monument behind, only the contested accounts of journalists and diplomats who struggled to agree on what had happened, let alone how many had perished.