Keelung Campaign

Keelung Campaign
Part of the Sino-French War
French forces land at Keelung, 1 October 1884
Date August 1884 to March 1885 Location northern coast of Taiwan Result Strategic and Tactical stalemate, French failure
Belligerents
France	China
Commanders and leaders
Amédée Courbet Sébastien Lespès Jacques Duchesne	Liu Mingchuan Sun Kaihua Su Desheng Zhang Gaoyuan Cao Zhizhong Lin Chaodong Wang Shizheng
Strength
twenty plus warships 4,500 infantry (by March 1885)	35,000 infantry (by March 1885
Casualties and losses
around 700 dead, several hundred wounded	several thousand killed and wounded

The Keelung Campaign (August 1884–April 1885) was a controversial military campaign undertaken by the French in northern Formosa (Taiwan) during the Sino-French War. After making a botched attack on Keelung in August 1884, the French landed an expeditionary corps of 2,000 men and captured the port in October 1884. Unable to advance beyond their bridgehead, they were invested inside Keelung by superior Chinese forces under the command of the imperial commissioner Liu Mingchuan. In November and December 1884 cholera and typhoid drained the strength of the French expeditionary corps, while reinforcements for the Chinese army flowed into Formosa via the Pescadores Islands, raising its strength to 35,000 men by the end of the war. Reinforced in January 1885 to a strength of 4,500 men, the French won two impressive tactical victories against the besieging Chinese in late January and early March 1885, but were not strong enough to exploit these victories. The Keelung campaign ended in April 1885 in a strategic and tactical stalemate. The campaign was criticised at the time by Admiral Amédée Courbet, the commander of the French Far East Squadron, as strategically irrelevant and a wasteful diversion of the French navy.

Following the defeat of China's Guangxi Army by the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps in the Bac Ninh campaign (March 1884), a two-year confrontation between France and China in northern Vietnam was ended on 11 May 1884 by the conclusion of the Tientsin Accord, under which the Chinese undertook to withdraw their troops from Vietnam and to recognise a French protectorate in Tonkin. However, the hopes aroused by this agreement, which seemed to have brought France's Tonkin campaign to a victorious end, were shattered on 23 June 1884 by the Bac Le ambush, in which a French column advancing to occupy Lang Son and other frontier towns was attacked near Bac Le by a detachment of the Guangxi Army.

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