Works on Arab history at the turn of the twentieth century often focus on how the Arabs interacted with European powers, but seldom study how they interacted with or perceived East Asia. Following some recent pioneering scholarship on Arab-Japan connections during this period, this paper seeks to examine the Arab perception of East Asia through the lens of an important historical event—the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). This event, which fundamentally changed the power relations between China and Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, has been the subject of numerous studies, but mainly in the context of East Asian history. Its impact outside the region has rarely been dealt with. What was the response from the Arab world to a seemingly faraway warfare in East Asia? What was the image of East Asia in the eyes of Arab intellectuals before and after the war? How did Arab intellectuals form their perceptions of East Asia? And what were the effects of these perceptions on the following historical developments of the Arab world? These are the major questions I investigate in this paper. I argue that although Arab intellectuals meant to seek inspiration from the rise of Japan and drew lessons from the decline of China for their struggle against European powers, their source of information about East Asia was still often mediated by European languages and modes of knowledge production. European Orientalist writings on China and Japan were picked up by Arab intellectuals of the time and formed an indirect impact on the Arab perception of East Asia. Hence, the title of my paper—mediated imaginations. Exploring such a topic can shed new light on how ideas flew from one periphery to another among non-Western peoples during the high tide of Western global expansion. It hopes to deepen our understanding of world history at large and add to an emerging historiography of transnational scholarship. This paper is primarily based on archival Arabic newspaper reports on the first Sino-Japanese War in the leading newspapers of the time, such as al-Muqtataf. I place these materials in the context of the Arab intellectual awakening and their understanding of the world at the turn of the twentieth century.