Keelung campaign

Keelung campaign
Part of the Sino-French War

French forces land at Keelung, 1 October 1884
DateAugust 1884 to March 1885
Location
northern coast of Taiwan
Result Chinese victory
Belligerents
French Third Republic France Qing dynasty Qing Empire
Commanders and leaders
French Third Republic Amédée Courbet
French Third Republic Sébastien Lespès
French Third Republic Jacques Duchesne
Qing dynasty Liu Mingchuan[1]
Qing dynasty Sun Kaihua
Qing dynasty Su Desheng
Qing dynasty Zhang Gaoyuan
Qing dynasty Cao Zhizhong
Qing dynasty Lin Chaodong
Qing dynasty Wang Shizheng
Strength
20+ warships
4,500 to 10,000 infantry (by March 1885)
20,000 to 35,000 infantry (by March 1885)
Casualties and losses
~700 dead, several hundred wounded Several thousand killed and wounded

The Keelung campaign (August 1884–April 1885) was a controversial military campaign undertaken by French forces 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.

  1. ^ Keeling 2011, p. 386.