Sino-French War
| Sino-French War | |||||||||
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| Part of the French conquest of Vietnam and the Tonkin campaign | |||||||||
Operations of the Sino-French War | |||||||||
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| France | |||||||||
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Clodfelter:
Mounier-Kuhn:
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The Sino-French or Franco-Chinese War, also known as the Tonkin War, was a limited conflict fought from August 1884 to April 1885 between the French Third Republic and Qing China for influence in Vietnam. There was no declaration of war.
The Chinese armies performed better than in their other nineteenth-century wars. Although French forces emerged victorious from most engagements, the Chinese scored noteworthy successes on land, notably forcing the French to hastily withdraw from occupied Lạng Sơn in the late stages of the war, thus gaining control of the town and its surroundings. However, a lack of foreign support, French naval supremacy, and northern threats posed by Russia and Japan forced China to enter negotiations.
China ceded to France its sphere of influence over Northern and Central Vietnam, which respectively became the protectorates of Tonkin and Annam. Both sides ratified the Treaty of Tientsin and no diplomatic gain was reaped by either nation. On another note, the war strengthened the dominance of Empress Dowager Cixi over the Chinese government but France securing its strategic objective did not prevent the collapse of French Prime Minister Jules Ferry's government for whom the Tonkin Affair was ignominious.