Sino-French War

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Sino-French War
Foochow – Tuyen Quang – Zhennan Pass

Sino-French War
Foochow – Tuyen Quang – Zhennan Pass

The 1884 Battle of Foochow. 19th century painting.

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.

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 who was formerly a 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.

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 Hué treaty, 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 11 May and 9 June, 1884 Treaties of Tien Tsin, 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 premiere 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 future Marshal of France Joffre participated as a captain of engineers).

In August 1884 at the Battle of Foochow, French forces utterly destroyed the anchored and inferior Chinese naval fleet that had been built, ironically, under the supervision of Prosper Gicquel, a French citizen in China. The French issued no declaration of war and the battle lasted less than thirty minutes. 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 celebrated defense by a battalion of the French Foreign Legion. 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. Following an unsuccessful counter-attack by the Chinese (mainly militia regiments of Zhuang ethnic background under the command of Feng Zicai), the acting French commander hastily abandoned Lang Son on March 28, 1885, news of which brought about the fall of the Jules Ferry government in France.

Despite the retreat, the earlier success of ground operations in Tonkin and on Formosa, the Chinese government's lack of will to continue the conflict, and France's overwhelming advantage at sea brought this war to its end. The treaty ending the war was signed on June 9, 1885, as China acknowledged the Treaty of Hué and gave up its suzerainty over the Empire of Annam. Annam and Tonkin were incorporated into French Indochina soon thereafter.

Sino-French War

See also