Tonkin campaign
| Tonkin Campaign Campagne du Tonkin |
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 Capture of Bắc Ninh, 12 March 1884 |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
 France
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 China Black Flag Army Vietnam
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| Strength | |||||||||
| 35,000 soldiers by summer 1885 | 50,000 Chinese soldiers 10,000 Vietnamese soldiers 3,000 Black Flag soldiers |
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| 2,100 killed or wounded | 10,000 killed or wounded | ||||||||
The Tonkin Campaign was an armed conflict fought between June 1883 and April 1886 by the French against, variously, the Vietnamese, Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army and the Chinese Guangxi and Yunnan armies to occupy Tonkin (northern Vietnam) and entrench a French protectorate there. The campaign, complicated in August 1884 by the outbreak of the Sino-French War and in July 1885 by the Cần Vương nationalist uprising in Annam, which required the diversion of large numbers of French troops, was conducted by the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps, supported by the gunboats of the Tonkin Flotilla. The campaign officially ended in April 1886, when the expeditionary corps was reduced in size to a division of occupation, but Tonkin was not effectively pacified until 1896.
Nine years after Francis Garnier's failed attempt to conquer Tonkin, French and Vietnamese troops clashed in Tonkin on 25 April 1882, when Commandant Henri Rivière seized the citadel of Hanoi with a small force of marine infantry.
After a lull of several months, the arrival of reinforcements from France in February 1883 allowed Rivière to mount a campaign to capture the citadel of Nam Định (27 March 1883). The Capture of Nam Định was strategically necessary for the French, to secure their communications with the sea.
During Rivière's absence at Nam Định with the bulk of his forces, chef de bataillon Berthe de Villers defeated a Vietnamese attack on the French positions at Hanoi by Prince Hoàng Kế Viêm at the Battle of Gia Cuc (27 and 28 March 1883).
Although these early actions deserve to be considered part of the Tonkin campaign, the campaign is conventionally considered to have begun in June 1883, in the wake of the decision by the French government to despatch reinforcements to Tonkin to avenge Rivière's defeat and death at the hands of Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army at the Battle of Paper Bridge on 19 May 1883. These reinforcements were organised into a Tonkin Expeditionary Corps, which was placed under the command of général de brigade Alexandre-Eugène Bouët (1833–87), the highest-ranking marine infantry officer available in the French colony of Cochinchina.
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Wikipedia