New Army

The New Army (Traditional Chinese: 新軍, Simplified Chinese: 新军; Pinyin: Xīnjūn, Manchu: Ice cooha), more fully called the Newly Created Army ( Xinjian Lujun), was the combined modernised army corps formed under the Qing dynasty in December 1895, following its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War. At first it consisted of a few experimental units, but after 1901 it was envisioned as a regular and professional army, fully trained and equipped according to Western standards with a reserve. In 1903 an imperial edict expanded it to 36 divisions of 12,500 men each, or total of 450,000 in peacetime supplemented by a further 523,000 reservists in wartime, though it never achieved a strength above 300,000.