Chinese artillery sinks a French gunboat at Fuchou in 1884. On the whole, however, it was the European ability to attack coastal towns and penetrate China’s interior, in particular the Yangtze along which many of the most important towns lay, that gave relatively small European forces the ability to influence Chinese policy.

British frigates approach Canton on the Pearl river during the Opium War of 1839-42. Chinese junks were unable to prevent British vessels from attacking coastal fortifications, or from cutting the vital Grand Canal that carried much of China’s north-south trade. British smugglers quashed Chinese efforts to keep opium out of the country.

British victory in the Opium War with China (1839-42) demonstrated how relatively small naval forces could impose their will even on a vast continental empire. Sea power allowed the British to transform what the imperial court in Beijing viewed as a distant dispute in Canton into a struggle which directly threatened the economic health and political stability of the empire itself. Junks and poorly defended Chinese coastal fortifications offered scant defence against twenty-five Royal Navy ships of the line, fourteen steamers, and nine support vessels carrying 10,000 troops. With this relatively small force, the British seized four important coastal trading centres, sailed up the Yangtze River to block the Grand Canal which carried much of the Celestial Empire’s north-south commercial traffic, and threatened Nanking. This was enough to bring the Chinese to the peace table. However, in 1884-5 the French were far less successful in employing their navy to wring concessions from the Chinese when they attacked Formosa which, clearly, Beijing did not believe vital to its interests. The creation of a gunboat force was critical in allowing the Celestial Empire to defeat the Taiping and Nien rebellions, sparked by European encroachment, in the 1860s. Naval artillery made the walled cities held by the Taipings along the Yangtze untenable. Gun sampans and eventually gunboats on the Yellow river and Grand Canal escorted grain convoys, and linked a defensive chain of fortifications created to keep Nien forces from breaking out across the Yellow river, much as the British in the Boer War of 1899-1902 used railways to link barriers of blockhouses built to contain Boer commandos. The French pioneered river flotillas to advance up the Senegal river toward the Niger from the 1850s.

Battle of Ma Jiang

The extraordinary Battle of Ma Jiang took place at the mouth of the Min River on August 23rd 1884, the hottest and most uncomfortable time of year in Fuzhou, when most of the foreign inhabitants of the town would have long been settled in the cool of the mountains of Kuliang.

The French China fleet sailed unmolested into the Fuzhou harbour, into what would normally considered to be a trap, stayed there for a month and then opened fire on the anchored Chinese fleet. The battle lasted thirty minutes; the overwhelming firepower of the French battleships resulted in the sinking of five of the Chinese vessels.

There is little easily available documentation of this battle in English. That which is available is in Chinese or Japanese. A question to be answered is why the Northern Fleet was not dispatched to blockade the French. One of the reasons offered is that the commander of the Northern Fleet did not wish to lose control of his ships. This sounds rather weak but credible given the vacillation of the Qing court.

A second question is,  what was the reaction of the foreigners living in Fuzhou at that time. There were a large number of foreign businesses in Fuzhou at that time, and a number of consulates.

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The river battle of Ma Jiang may be a forgotten conflict so far as the rest of the world and perhaps most of China is concerned, but it is commemorated by a museum for the martyrs who died in the battle. To the people of the villages of Mawei and Qin Jiang, this is another example of treachery and deviousness perpetrated by foreign forces in China. But now, the battle rates only a few lines in the history books and no more than a dozen web pages in Japanese, Chinese English and French.

The Sino-French War or Franco-Chinese War was a war fought between the French Third Republic and Qing Empire that lasted from September 1884 to June 1885. Its underlying cause was the French desire for control of the Red River (Yuan Jiang), which linked Hanoi to the resource-wealthy Yunnan province in China.

Although the 1874 Treaty of Saigon opened the river to navigation, in the early 1880s harassment by the Black Flag, a militia regiment raised by Liu Yung-fu (an ethnic Zhuang who was formerly a Taiping rebel in China) impeded French traders. Consequently, the French government dispatched a small expeditionary force to clear the Red River valley of Black Flags. The Qing court viewed the presence of a European army in Tonkin as a threat to its frontier security. It protested the French presence and began to prepare for war.

French forces under Captain Henri Rivière seized the citadel of Hanoi, the capital of Tonkin on April 25, 1882. Rivière was killed while clearing Black Flags from the Red River delta in the spring of 1883, provoking a groundswell of pro-war sentiment in France against the Chinese.

On 14th July,  the French fleet under the command of Admiral Courbet sailed unmolested into the Min River, past the defensive fortifications, up to the Marine shipyard near the Youxing pagoda. The tolerant reception of an obviously aggressive force was because the Qing government in Beijing had advised that any offensive reaction could affect mediation between the Qing government and France.

As a result of indecision and inaction by Beijing, the Chinese and French fleet docked stem to stern in the harbour for over a month.  The Fujian government asked Northern Fleet Minister Li Hongzhang for reinforcements from Tianjing, but this was refused,

August 19, 1884, France demanded an indemnity from the Qing Government and presented an ultimatum which the Qing Government rejected.

August 21 the French government withdrew its Ambassador and ordered his return to France. At the same time France ordered Admiral Courbet to prepare for war.

22nd, Courbet received the French government’s order, and that evening at 8 o’clock the French ships’ captains held an operational conference and decided on the next day at 2 p.m.[1], using the ebb tide to move the ships to be best vantage point .to attack the Chinese fleet.

August 23 at 8 AM, the French consul in Fuzhou notified the various consulates that they are about to declare war and advised them to move their ships to safety.. British vessels, Champion, Sapphire and Vigilance, and US vessel Enterprise were in port. At 10 a.m., the Fujian  governor received the war declaration from the French, and he in turn informed Zhang Peilun who asked for a delay. Courbet immediately issued an order to the French fleet to open fire, and the battle of Majiang naval started at 1:45 p.m. August 23, 1884.

Although the Chinese fleet was severely outgunned and most of the vessels were at anchor, when the Volta opened fire on the Fujian flagship, Wuyang, the Chinese fleet fought back as fiercely as was possible.

In August 1884 at the Battle of Foochow, French forces utterly destroyed the naval fleet (built, ironically, under the supervision of Prosper Gicquel, a French citizen in China) in less than thirty minutes while the Chinese fleet was at anchor.

Despite the defeat, the earlier success of ground operations in Tonkin and on Formosa, the Chinese government’s lack of will to continue the conflict, and France’s overwhelming advantage at sea brought this war to its end.

The treaty ending the war was signed on June 9, 1885, as China acknowledged the Treaty of Hué and gave up its suzerainty over the Empire of Annam. Annam and Tonkin were incorporated into French Indochina soon thereafter.

[1] the timing of the assault is interesting. If ever there is a time that the Chinese are most vulnerable, it is at the siesta time – after lunch. We can wonder if Admiral Courbet had that in mind.