Keelung campaign

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Keelung campaign
Part of the Sino-French War
French forces land at Keelung, 1 October 1884
Date August 1884 to March 1885 Location northern coast of Taiwan Result Chinese victory
Belligerents
France	Qing Empire
Commanders and leaders
Amédée Courbet Sébastien Lespès Jacques Duchesne	Liu Mingchuan[1] Sun Kaihua Su Desheng Zhang Gaoyuan Cao Zhizhong Lin Chaodong 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.