Portal:Military history of France/Selected article/6

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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, 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 and former 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. (More...)