"Ding Yuan" 1890s Imperial Chinese battleship (Zhengdefu kit)

Modeling Subjects Ships
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This is my latest completed (non-sailing) warship model. I also posted this on Modelwarships.com, not sure if anyone will be interested in it here but you never know!

Anyway, this is a rather long post as it explains both the history of the ship itself, and how I built the model.

The Ding Yuan (variously spelt as Ting Yuan and Ting Yuen, I believe the name translates as “Eternal Peace”, rather incongrously for a warship) was built in the 1880s in Germany and was the flagship of the Beiyang fleet (the first “modern” Chinese navy), along with its sister ship Chen Yuan. It took part in the Sino-Japanese War but its combat record was rather poor, and it was eventually sunk by Japanese torpedoes. (For a description of the battle of the Yalu River in which the ship fought, see here

These two ships were of a type of early battleship usually known as the “turret ship”. Other examples are the RN ship HMS Inflexible, the German Sachsen-class and the Italian Duilio. Unlike the Inflexible, the Ding Yuan had breech-loaded guns. Main armament was four 12’ guns mounted in two centrally-located turrets; two 5.9’ guns were mounted in secondary turrets at the bow and stern. Some references say that 37mm guns were also fitted but I’m not certain of this. (There are a number of pictures of a small-calibre gun on the previously mentioned replica website). The hull also appears to have a ram.

Two “vedette”-type steam torpedo boats were carried on board, each of which had two torpedo tubes. This was not at all unusual for warships of this period - there was even a RN cruiser (can’t remember its name) which was designed specifically as a torpedo boat carrier.
Also carried are 3 lifeboats and a steam pinnace.

What inspired me to build a model of this ship (not to mention take the time to locate the kit on eBay!) was this website, which I think someone posted a link to on this forum a few months ago. A full size replica of the Ding Yuan was built a few years ago in China, apparently complete in every detail! It’s nothing short of incredible (shame this can’t be done with a historic RN warship, for example!)
The site has many photos of the replica ship and is a very useful source of reference material - definitely necessary considering how much scratchbuilding + detailing the kit needs.

The kit is one of the Zhengdefu 33cm “box scale” kits, listed as 1/300 but scales out to around 1/280. As it’s quite a small ship (compared to 20th-century warships) it wouldn’t look too out of place in a 1/350 collection. It’d also look good alongside the other 19th century warships in this scale range, such as the Oregon, Olympia and cruiser Zhiyuen (the latter also a Zhengdefu kit), which is what I’ll do when I get round to building the latter.

It’s a very interesting kit as it is (I believe) the only injection-moulded kit of this early style of pre-dreadnought battleship. However the quality of both the mouldings and detail is typical Zhengdefu (anyone who’s built one of their 1/48 tanks will know what I mean) and it requires a fair amount of both cleanup and detail scratchbuilding to produce a good model. Reference material is easy to find thankfully due to the replica ship! See the end of the post for the exact details of how I improved the kit.

The only serious inaccuracy (as opposed to crude or nonexistent detail) in the kit is the turrets - these have a vertical ridged pattern and large hatches on their roofs, in reality they are smooth cylinders with a flange/ridge at the base and do not have roof hatches (presumably access is from below). The cylindrical shape of the turret makes it easy to “reskin” them with thin styrene sheet, which improves their appearance a lot.
The torpedo boats and steam pinnace are also pretty awful (the torpedo boats look like scaled-down cruise liners, and the pinnace resembles one of those candle-powered tin toy boats), so it’s best to just use the kit hulls and scratchbuild the rest of them.

Other annoyances are the flanges on top of the larger vents (easily sawn off), and the large “sockets” on the deck which the vents, davits, etc. are meant to fit into; removing these (with a chisel-ended craft knife blade) was a pain. The deck planking is also out of scale but I couldn’t face either rescribing it or recovering the deck with plank-textured styrene - hence I just scribed some plank end gaps, which improves the appearance even if the decks are several scale feet wide!

The model was painted with Tamiya and Revell acrylics, and weathered with artist’s acrylics. The paint scheme was based on the replica ship (missing only the white boot stripe). The ship’s colour scheme during the Battle of the Yalu River was apparently similar other than the funnels (and possibly masts) being repainted grey.

Anyway, here are the photos:




Three overall views of the ship.




Detail closeups.

If anyone’s interested, here’s a list of the modifications and additions I made to the basic kit - this may be useful if you’re thinking of building this kit in the future. I used assorted styrene stock, thin black thread, copper chain, some Heller 1/400 railings, a couple of 1/350 searchlights and anchors, four 1/200ish bollards (not sure what kit they were originally from) and a few other small odds and ends from the spares box.

  • Drilled out all guns and vents.

  • Drilled out all portholes.

  • Drilled out bridge windows and filed the holes into a square shape.

  • Drilled out anchor hawsepipes.

  • Removed moulded anchors/chains and the locating rings for the vents.

  • Removed moulded hatches from turrets roofs.

  • Filled in screw and rigging holes in deck.

  • Scribed plank ends on deck.

  • Resurfaced the vertical surfaces of all 4 turrets with 0.25mm styrene sheet.

  • Added “flange” to turret bases with 0.5mm square styrene rod.

  • Scratchbuilt replacement funnel tops.

  • Replaced funnel steam pipes with 1.5mm styrene rod.

  • Reshaped the tops of the larger vents.

  • Removed moulded “railings” around bridge deck and replaced with railings from the spares box.

  • Scratchbuilt binnacle + compass on bridge roof + added searchlight and railings (removed the moulded ledge which
    represents the railings)

  • Scratchbuilt wheel in front of bridge.

  • Replaced the mast cross-pieces with styrene rod.

  • Added rigging to masts.

  • Added searchlights (from the spares box) to the upper 2 spotting tops.

  • Added bollards to deck (2 on either side)

  • Added replacement anchors + chains.

  • Added “ledge” below anchor hawsepipes.

  • Scratchbuilt replacement deck and details for the 2 torpedo boats.

  • Added planking, seats and scratchbuilt boiler/funnel to the steam pinnace.

  • Added planking to the 3 other boats.

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An interesting alternative to the popular warships. I get so used to seeing detail-detail-detail of the more modern boats that it takes a bit of retraining the eye to look at a ship design like this. The boat makes one think more of a steamer cruise ship than a floating arsenal, eh?

Definitely see you did an overhaul on it. Nicely done.

Looks like it might be a fun kit to take on with the approach of working over like you did.

Was there anything about markings or flags or such that would have been a part of the original craft?

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If I am not mistaken, Ding Yuan means “Pacifying distant regions”, and Chen Yuan means “Mastering distant regions”. I believe the names of most major Chinese warships of the last dynasty are based on two words meaning doing something to distant regions, such as governing distant regions, enforcing in distant regions, growth in distant regions, etc.

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Thanks for the replies! Regarding flags/markings, the kit is supplied with a fairly crude “sticker” flag with a dragon emblem, and another sticker “decal” (printed on transparent plastic) with the Chinese ideograms for the ship’s name, intended to be applied to the bows - I might try painting the latter on instead. I’ll also probably add some signal flags to the rigging.

The Ding Yuan is certainly very odd-looking compared to any 20th-century warship, but it’s actually fairly representative of warship design at the time it was built; as mentioned, there were a number of other ships similar in design, such as HMS Inflexible, as well as ships such as the ill-fated HMS Captain and the (still in existence, rusting away off the Australian coast) HMS Cerberus which were similar in concept but with a more conventional “fore and aft” turret layout.
It seems to be more or less an intermediate design between the early turret monitors and later pre-dreadnought battleships (of which the Oregon is an example)

I also have the Zhengdefu kit of the light cruiser “Zhiyuan”, another Beiyang Fleet ship. This was apparently an “Elswick cruiser”, an export design built in the UK by Armstrong. The kit is similar to the Ding Yuan in both scale (about 1/250) and, unfortunately, quality, so it will require a similar amount of reworking to produce a decent result. However, kits of warships from this period are very thin on the ground (water?) other than expensive limited-run resin kits. Despite their severe lack of quality, I’m still grateful to Zhengdefu for producing kits of a 19th century turret ship and light cruiser in a large scale and at an affordable price!

Also, here’s a close-up photo of one of the torpedo boats (forgot to post it earlier). Everything but the hull is scratchbuilt.

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I was eyeballing that little thing and trying to figure it out. Is that a windshield mounted there? And a steam-power operation? Were these open top craft or enclosed cabin?

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Hello,

I have both the Ting Yuen (Dingyuan) and the Chih Yuen (Zhiyuan). These two kits are mere toys and they have few parts that can be used. But as you said quite rightly, they are the only injection moulded models of the warships of the transition era from composite wood/iron construction to modern steel hull. I’m trying to find plans of both ships for a major semi-scratchbuilding project to obtain two decent scale models.

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That’s a very impressive build of an odd-looking ship!

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All of the deck detail on the torpedo boat was scratchbuilt by me, based on photographs of the restored Ding Yuan (most of which don’t give a very good view of the boats). Hence its accuracy definitely isn’t guaranteed!
The boats were steam-powered and were definitely open-topped (they’re very small, significantly smaller than the average WW2 MTB/PT). I can’t work out from the photos whether they had an actual cabin or just a “windshield” so went with the latter.

The hulls of the torpedo boats supplied with the kit are actually not really the right shape - they should be significantly longer for a start, and should also be more sharply pointed at the stern. But it was the best I could do without carving replacements from balsa, and they look reasonable given that they’re just part of a larger model.
I should have put a coin or ruler in the photo to give an idea of the boat’s size (it’s 6cm long)

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Possibly one of the neatest surface ships I have seen in a month of sundays…very well done, sir! Very refreshing after the usual stuff.

greg

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That is a sweet ship you have there. I love seeing models of obscure ships from history. Thanks for posting it!

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First of all, your craftsmanship is very good … and I, too, like to see examples of obscure vessels done in scale. But the ship itself … it’s one goofy-looking warship. I know it precedes the more modern dreadnaughts by a few decades, but it still has a sort of comic look about it … like something Popeye used to fight Bluto for the hand of Olive Oyl. It’s cute like a Horny Toad …

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I more or less agree with you [:D] Whilst there aren’t many capital ship designs from this period which can be described as “elegant” or “graceful”, they’re still very interesting - rather like aircraft from the pre-WW1 “pioneer” era, nobody was quite sure what worked and what wouldn’t, and there were a large number of “oddball” experimental designs, some more successful than others! There were a lot of features popular with 19th-century warship designers which proved to be fairly useless in combat, such as the ram and underwater torpedo tubes.

However, as I mentioned before, the Ding Yuan is by no means unique in its appearance - HMS Inflexible is virtually identical other than the bow and stern secondary turrets, and the German and Italian navies also had similar battleships.
If you think this one is odd-looking, you should see some of the French ships from this period! They look like floating flat-irons, with hull shapes more suited to a submarine than a surface vessel.

Possibly the ugliest of them all was HMS Royal Sovereign, one of the first turreted RN ships. It has a bulky hull reminiscent of a wooden ship-of-the-line, four cylindrical turrets like those on the Ding Yuan, no superstructure to speak of, and a single huge funnel, along with a set of sails (evidently the designers didn’t completely trust steam propulsion)

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Right on all accounts. I think by the time of Tsushima the old reciprocating coal burner were starting to work out some of those details and really hard a gnarly, hard-bitten look to them. I particulalry like the elephatine looks of some of the Russian pre-dreadnaughts that had big curved bulges at the waterline that tapered up into an iron castle of fat guns. Lots of personality, even if they did get Togo’d into oblivion. I really wish we could see a ot more of Jeff Herne’s IJN Mikasa, too. The shot in the magazine was too small and only one frame … and we do love your work, Jeff …