The Sino-French War (Chinese: 中法戰争; pinyin: Zhōng fǎ Zhànzhēng, French: Guerre franco-chinoise, Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Pháp-Thanh) 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 individu...
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The Sino-French War (Chinese: 中法戰争; pinyin: Zhōng fǎ Zhànzhēng, French: Guerre franco-chinoise, Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Pháp-Thanh) 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 in China and Taiwan the war is even regarded as a Chinese victory.
French interest in northern Vietnam dated from the 1840s, when France 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...
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