1884 in China

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 34. Chapters: Sino-French War, Battle of Fuzhou, Bac Le ambush, Bac Ninh campaign, Battle of Yu Oc, Tonkinese Rifles, Kep Campaign, Tientsin Accord. Excerpt: The Sino-French War (Chinese: ; pinyin: Zhong fa Zhànzheng, French: , Vietnamese: ) was a limited conflict fought between August 1884 and April 1885 to decide whether France should replace China in control of Tonkin (northern Vietnam). As the French achieved their war aims, they are usually considered to have won the war. Nevertheless, the French triumph was marred by a number of defeats in individual battles and the Chinese armies performed rather better than they did in China's other nineteenth-century foreign wars. In some quarters near Guangxi and in Taiwan the war is even regarded as a Chinese victory. French interest in northern Vietnam dated from the late 18th-century, when the political Catholic priest Pigneau de Behaine recruited French volunteers to fight for Nguyen Anh to start the Nguyen Dynasty in an attempt to gain privileges for France and the Roman Catholic Church. In 1858, France began their colonial campaign and in 1862 annexed several southern provinces of Vietnam to become the colony of Cochinchina, laying the foundations for its later colonial empire in Indochina. French explorers followed the course of the Red River through northern Vietnam to its source in Yunnan, arousing hopes that an extremely profitable overland trade route could be established with China, bypassing the treaty ports of the Chinese coastal provinces. The main obstacle to the realisation of this dream was the Black Flag Army, a well-organized bandit force under a formidable leader, Liu Yongfu (Liu Yung-fu, ¿¿¿), which was levying exorbitant dues on trade on the Red River between Son Tay and the town of Lao Cai on the Yunnan border. Commandant Henri Rivière (1827-83)French intervention in northern Vietnam was precipitated by Commandant Henri Rivière, who was sent with a small French military force to Hanoi at the end of 1881 to investigate Vietnamese complaints against the activities of French merchants. In defiance of the instructions of his superiors, Rivière stormed the ci