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The 'Sino-French War' or 'Franco-Chinese War' was a war fought between the French Third Republic and Qing Empire that lasted from September 1884 to June 1885. Its underlying cause was the French desire for control of the Red River, which linked Hanoi to the resource-wealthy Yunnan province in China.

Contents

Prelude

War

Battle of Foochow (August 1884)

Battle of Zhennan Pass and the Retreat from Lang Son (February 1885)

Aftermath

See also

Prelude

Although the 1874 Treaty of Saigon opened the river to navigation, in the early 1880s harassment by the Black Flag, a militia regiment raised by Liu Yung-fu (an ethnic Zhuang and former Taiping rebel in China) impeded French traders. Consequently, the French government dispatched a small expeditionary force to clear the Red River valley of Black Flags. The Qing court viewed the presence of a European army in Tonkin as a threat to its frontier security. It protested the French presence and began to prepare for war.

War

French forces under Captain Henri Rivière seized the citadel of Hanoi, the capital of Tonkin, on April 25, 1882. Rivière was killed while clearing Black Flags from the Red River delta in the spring of 1883, provoking a groundswell of pro-war sentiment in France.
On August 25 1883 the Treaty of Hué, ceding Tonkin to France as a protectorate, was signed between the Emperor of Annam and France. China rejected this treaty, and moved forces into Tonkin province. Although neither China nor France declared war on the other, combat operations began in the autumn of 1883. French riverine forces seized the citadels of Bac Ninh, Son Tay and Tuyen Quang.

In the May 11 and June 9 1884 Treaties of Tianjin, China acknowledged the Hué Treaty. However, in June 1884, at the hamlet of Bac Le, Chinese forces attacked a French column sent to occupy the country in accordance with the treaties. This resulted in the expansion of the war. Although the theater's naval and ground commanders urged a direct attack on the Qing capital at Beijing, French Prime Minister Jules Ferry restricted operations to Indochina and the South China sea, as he feared an attack on Beijing would provoke a response by the other European powers, particularly Britain and Russia. The French Navy, under the command of Admiral Amédée Courbet, blockaded the Keelung and Tamsui harbors of Taiwan and conducted an amphibious operation against Qing forces on the island (in which Joseph Joffre, future Marshal of France, participated as a captain of engineers).

Battle of Foochow (August 1884)

In August 1884 at the Battle of Foochow, French forces utterly destroyed the anchored Chinese naval fleet--built, ironically, under the supervision of Prosper Giquel, a French citizen. The battle lasted less than thirty minutes. From 1 October 1884 to July 1885, the French occupied Keelung (Jilong), and from 29 March 1885 the Pescadores as well.
In Tonkin, however, the monsoon season precluded offensive operations by the French, allowing the Chinese to advance to the edge of the Red River delta. During this operation, the Chinese laid siege to the fortress of Tuyen Quang, leading to its defense by a battalion of the French Foreign Legion, still celebrated in the official march of the Foreign Legion.

Battle of Zhennan Pass and the Retreat from Lang Son (February 1885)

A French expeditionary force comprising two brigades marched into Upper Tonkin and captured Lang Son in February 1885. One brigade then departed to relieve Tuyen Quang, leaving the other isolated at Lang Son. Its commander, seeking to roll back the build-up of offensive power by the Chinese, attacked across the Chinese border and was defeated at the Battle of Zhennan Pass. Falling back to Lang Son, the French defeated a counterattack at the Battle of Ky Lua. However, the brigade commander was wounded at the end of the action, and the acting brigade commander, possibly in a state of panic, ordered the hasty abandonment of Lang Son on March 28 1885. The brigade fell back in disarray towards the Red River Delta, abandoning nearly all French gains made during the 1885 campaign and leading the commander of the expeditionary corps, Henri Briere de l'Isle, to believe that the Delta was in jeopardy. His dispatches to Paris to this effect brought about the fall of the Jules Ferry government in France.
Within a few days, Briere de l'Isle realized the situation was less grave than it had initially appeared. However, the new ministry acted to bring about an end to the war.
The defeat, which the French called the "''Tonkin'' affair", was a major political scandal for the proponents for French colonial expansion. It was not until the early 1890s that French colonial party regained domestic political support. ^[1]

Aftermath

Despite the retreat from Lang Son, France's overall success on the ground, and above all its naval victories, led the Chinese mandarin Li Hongzhang to sign a controversial treaty ending the war on June 9 1885, with China acknowledging the Treaty of Hué and relinquishing its suzerainty over the Empire of Annam. Annam and Tonkin were incorporated into French Indochina as protectorates soon thereafter. The controversial treaty caused heavy criticism to be levelled on Li Hongzhang and the Qing government, and created nationalistic sentiment throughout China. The war was a significant step in the decline of the Qing empire, due both to the humiliation of the loss and the destruction of the Southern fleet. It also demonstrated the flaws in the late-Qing national defense system of independent regional armies, as northern Chinese forces, both ground and naval, declined to participate in the campaign.
The war's principal effect in metropolitan France was to bring down the long-running Ferry ministry. Ferry would never again serve as premiere.

See also

★ Imperialism in Asia