Battle of Palan

French artillerymen at Palan bring up their guns

Date	1 September 1883
Location	near Hanoi, Northern Vietnam
Result	French tactical victory

Belligerents

France

Black Flag Army
Nguyễn dynasty

Commanders and leaders

Alexandre-Eugène Bouët

Liu Yongfu

Strength

900 French marine infantry and Cochinchinese riflemen
450 Yellow Flag auxiliaries
1 artillery battery
6 gunboats

1,200 Black Flag soldiers
3,000 Vietnamese soldiers

Casualties and losses

16 dead, 43 wounded

60 Chinese dead (by body count), but most probably several hundred dead and wounded

The Battle of Palan (1 September 1883) was one of several clashes between the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps and Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army during the Tonkin campaign (1883–1886). The battle, a French victory, took place during the period of increasing tension between France and China that eventually culminated in the Sino-French War (August 1884–April 1885).

The Battle of Palan was fought two weeks after the Battle of Phu Hoai, in which General Alexandre-Eugène Bouët (1833–87), the French commandant supérieur in Tonkin, had failed to defeat Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army. Heavy flooding in mid-August had obliged the Black Flags to abandon their positions in front of the Day River and retreat behind the river. The key to their new positions were the villages of Phong (or Phung), commanding the main road to Son Tay at its crossing of the Day River, and Palan (also known as Ba Giang), at the junction of the Red and Day rivers.

Under pressure from Jules Harmand, the French civil commissioner general in Tonkin, Bouët attacked the new Black Flag positions at the end of August to clear the road to Son Tay, the ultimate French objective. Bouët committed 1,800 French soldiers to this offensive. The French force consisted of two marine infantry battalions (chefs de bataillon Berger and Roux), each strengthened by contingents of Cochinchinese riflemen, one marine artillery battery (Captain Roussel) and a battalion of Yellow Flag auxiliaries. The attackers were supported by the gunboats Pluvier, Léopard, Fanfare, Éclair, Hache and Mousqueton from the Tonkin Flotilla, under the command of capitaine de vaisseau Morel-Beaulieu.

On 31 August the village of Palan, bombarded from the rear by the gunboats and attacked frontally by Berger's battalion, was captured without difficulty, and its defenders fled in disorder along the dyke.

At dawn on 1 September the column advanced along a two-metre wide dyke which ran along the bank of the Day River towards its main objective: Phong, a principal point on the road to Son Tay. Its front and left were screened by heavy skirmish lines of Tonkinese and Cochinchinese riflemen. Meanwhile, the gunboats ascended the Red River. Pluvier and Fanfare remained at the confluence of the Red and Day rivers to support an infantry company guarding Palan, while Mousqueton, Éclair and Hache moved up the Day to support the attack column.

...
Wikipedia