Keelung campaign

The Keelung Campaign (October 1884 to April 1885) was a military campaign undertaken by the French in northern Formosa (Taiwan) during the Sino-French War (August 1884–April 1885). Criticised at the time by Admiral Amédée Courbet as strategically irrelevant and a wasteful diversion of the French navy, the campaign forced the Chinese to commit substantial military forces to Formosa and also indirectly led to the loss of the Chinese warships Yuyuan and Dengching at the Battle of Shipu.

Background

French interest in the port of Keelung (Jilong, 基隆) in northern Formosa dated from February 1884, when Rear Admiral Sébastien Lespès, the commander of France's Far East naval division, recommended its seizure in the event of a war between France and China. In early August 1884, irritated by China's refusal to admit responsibility for the Bac Le Ambush and to implement the terms of the May 1884 Tientsin Accord, the French cabinet authorised Lespès to seize Keelung as a ‘pledge’ (gage) to be bargained against a Chinese withdrawal from Tonkin.

The inner harbour of Keelung was defended by three Chinese shore batteries: the Ta-sha-wan (大沙灣) and Erh-sha-wan (二沙灣) batteries on the eastern side of the harbour and a battery on the seaward slope of Mount Clement (Huo-hao-shan, 火號山), a prominent hill to the west of the town. On the morning of 5 August the French warships La Galissonnière, Villars and Lutin engaged and disabled all three batteries. Admiral Lespès put a landing force ashore in the afternoon to occupy Keelung and the nearby coal mines at Pei-tao (Pa-tou, 八斗), but the arrival of a large Chinese army under the command of the recently-appointed imperial commissioner Liu Ming-ch'uan (Liu Mingchuan, 劉銘傳) forced it to re-embark on 6 August.

French capture of Keelung, 1 October 1884

Liu Ming-ch'uan (1836-1896)

In the wake of the Battle of Fuzhou, which inaugurated the nine-month Sino-French War, the French decided to put pressure on China by landing an expeditionary corps in northern Formosa to seize Keelung, redeeming the failure of 6 August and finally winning the ‘pledge’ they sought. Admiral Courbet argued vigorously against a campaign in Formosa and submitted alternative proposals for a campaign in northern Chinese waters to seize Port Arthur or Weihaiwei. He was supported by Jules Patenôtre, the French minister to China. Both men were overruled. The French premier Jules Ferry fought the Sino-French War in the teeth of parliamentary disapproval, and was unable to give Courbet the resources necessary for a major campaign on the Chinese mainland. Keelung could be taken and held by a relatively small French force, and with its nearby coal mines would, it was thought, make an admirable wartime base for the Far East Squadron. The decision to attack Keelung was taken by the French cabinet on 18 September 1884. For good measure, the French cabinet sanctioned an attack on nearby Tamsui (Danshui, 淡水) also.

On 1 October 1884 Lieutenant-Colonel Bertaux-Levillain landed at Keelung with a small expeditionary corps (2,250 men) drawn from the French garrisons in Tonkin and Cochin China. The Formosa Expeditionary Corps (French: corps expéditionnaire de Formose) consisted of three four-company battalions of marine infantry (chefs de bataillon Ber, Lacroix and Lange), a marine artillery battery (Captain de Champglen), and a scratch battery of two 80-millimetre mountain guns and 4 Hotchkiss canons-revolvers. Supported by naval gunfire from several ships of Courbet's Far East Squadron, the French captured Mount Clement (Huo-hao-shan), flanking the Chinese out of their positions to the south of Keelung and threatening their line of retreat to Tamsui. French casualties in the battle for Mount Clement were negligible: 4 killed and 12 wounded. Chinese casualties, according to Formosan informants, were around 100 killed and 200 to 300 wounded. In the first week of October the French occupied several hills in the immediate vicinity of Keelung and began to fortify them. However, the expeditionary corps was too small to advance beyond Keelung, and the Pei-tao coal mines remained in Chinese hands.

Liu Mingchuan had commanded the unsuccessful defence of Keelung in person, with a Chinese division of 2,000 troops. Anticipating that the French would follow up their success with a landing at Tamsui, he left half of his force in strong defensive positions around Lok-tao (Liu-tu, 六堵), astride the road to Tamsui, and retreated to Tai-pak-fu (台北府, modern Taipei, 台北) with the rest on 3 October. It was rumoured that he intended to flee south to Tek-cham (竹塹, modern Hsinchu, 新竹), and his arrival in Tai-pak-fu was greeted with rioting. Several of his bodyguards were killed and he himself was arrested and held for several days in the city's Lung-shan temple.

French defeat at Tamsui, 8 October 1884

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French fusilier-marin, 1884

The action of 8 October 1884 at Tamsui (map by Captain Garnot of the 3rd African Battalion)

Meanwhile, after an ineffective naval bombardment on 2 October, Admiral Lespès attacked the Chinese defences at Tamsui with 600 sailors from the French squadron’s landing companies on 8 October. The Chinese forces at Tamsui, which numbered around 1,000 men, were under the command of the Fukienese general Sun K'ai-hua (孫開華) and Chang Kao-yuan (章高元). The attempt on Tamsui was one of the rare French defeats in the Sino-French War. The French fusiliers-marins were not trained to fight as line infantry, and were attacking over broken ground. Capitaine de frégate Boulineau of Château-Renaud, who had been placed in command of the attack at the last moment, lost control of his men. The French line gradually lost its cohesion and ammunition began to run short. Seeing the French in confusion, Sun K'ai-hua advanced with his own forces and outflanked the French on both wings. The French hastily withdrew to the shore and re-embarked under cover of the squadron's guns. French casualties at Tamsui were 17 dead and 49 wounded. Chinese casualties, according to European employees of the Tamsui customs, were 80 dead and around 200 wounded.

The French defeat is still remembered in Tamsui. According to local tradition, Sun K'ai-hua owed his victory to the intervention of the sea goddess Matsu. The Kuang-hsu emperor, on receiving Liu Ming-ch'uan's report of the victory, observed with satisfaction 'The goddess has been kind to my people and kind to myself.' A wooden commemorative tablet in the Fu-you kung, a Matsu temple in Tamsui built in 1796, bears the inscription yi-t'ien ch'ao-you (翌天昭佑), 'the noble sky brings kindly sunshine', in allusion to the emperor's words.

Actions around Keelung, November and December 1884

Cramoisy Pagoda, one of the improvised French forts covering the approaches to Keelung

As a result of the defeat at Tamsui, French control over Formosa was limited merely to the town of Keelung and to a number of positions on the surrounding hills. This achievement fell far short of what had been hoped for, and without reinforcements the French could go no further. They therefore did their best to fortify the precarious bridgehead at Keelung. Several forts were built to cover the various approaches to the town. Fort Clement, Fort Central and Fort Thirion faced west towards the Chinese positions at Lok-tao. Fort Tamsui and Eagle's Nest (Nid d'aigle) covered the approach to Keelung from the southwest along the main road from Tamsui. Cramoisy Pagoda, a large Chinese house converted into a fort and manned by Captain Cramoisy's marine infantry company, covered the sourthern approach to Keelung. Fort Ber, Fort Gardiol and Fort Bayard, a chain of forts collectively known as the 'Ber Lines', crowned the low range of hills that screened Keelung's eastern suburb of Sao-wan. The three Chinese forts disabled by the French in August were repaired and named respectively Fort Lutin, Fort Villars and Fort La Galissonnière, after the three ships that had engaged them.

On 2 November 1884 the Chinese general Ts’ao Chih-chung (曹志忠) attacked the French outposts of Fort Tamsui and Eagle's Nest to the southwest of Keelung with a force of 2,000 men. The attackers made a night march from Tsui-tng-ka (水返腳, now Hsi-chih, 汐止), hoping to take the French by surprise with a dawn attack, but failed to reach their positions in time. The Chinese attack was made in daylight and was easily repelled by the French, who mowed down the attackers with Hotchkiss and rifle fire. The Chinese admitted to a loss of 200 men in the attack, but the true figure was probably somewhat higher. One French soldier was lightly wounded. On 3 November a force of Chinese marauders approached Keelung from the south and tried to rush Cramoisy Pagoda, but were repelled without difficulty by its defenders. The attack was probably made by the Chinese in the hope that the French had lowered their guard after the failure of the previous day's assault.

Following the failure of these attacks Liu Ming-ch'uan began to invest Keelung, fortifying a number of hill positions to the south and southeast of the town. The Chinese built major forts on the summits of Shih-ch'iu-ling (獅球嶺), Hung-tan-shan (紅淡山) and Yueh-mei-shan (月眉山), linking them with an elaborate trench system. These forts were christened respectively by the French La Dent ('the fang'), Fort Bamboo and La Table. From its distinctive shape, Hung-tan-shan became Le Cirque ('the corry'). On 13 and 14 November the French destroyed the Chinese defences on the summit of Hung-tan-shan and burned the village of Nai-nin-ka (南寧腳) to the southeast of Shih-ch'iu-ling, which the Chinese were using as a supply depot. On 12 December the French captured and partly demolished the Shih-ch'iu-ling fort (La Dent), but were forced to withdraw by a Chinese counterattack. On each occasion the Chinese quickly made good the damage.

Although French losses in these engagements with Liu Ming-ch'uan's army were negligible, the Formosa expeditionary corps suffered heavy casualties from disease. An outbreak of cholera and typhus in November 1884 killed 83 French soldiers by 23 December and incapacitated hundreds more. On 1 December 1884 only 1,100 French soldiers were fit were action, half the number who had landed at Keelung two months earlier.

French offensive, January 1885

The French zone of occupation at Keelung (map by Captain Garnot of the 3rd African Battalion)

Towards the end of 1884 the French were able to enforce a limited blockade of the northern Formosan port of Tamsui and the southern ports of Tai-wan-fu (台灣府, modern Tainan, 台南) and Takao (打狗, modern Kaohsiung, 高雄). The blockade was relatively ineffective, and was unable to prevent the Chinese from using the Pescadores Islands as a staging post for landing large numbers of troops in southern Formosa. Substantial drafts from the Hunan and Anhui Armies raised the strength of Liu Ming-ch'uan’s defending army to around 25,000 men by the end of the year, and to around 35,000 men in April 1885.

Liu Ming-ch'uan also raised a corps of local Hakka militia under the command of Lin Ch'ao-tung (林朝棟), and at one point even recruited a band of head-hunting savages from the untamed central mountain region of Formosa. These illiterate tribesmen had long been accustomed to raid the peaceful Chinese villages of the plain, and Liu Ming-ch'uan seized the opportunity to divert their warlike energies against the French. In the event, the tribesmen were of little military value to the Chinese. They were armed only with matchlock rifles loaded with stone bullets, and French marine infantrymen who met them in battle during a skirmish on 20 November 1884 commented unkindly that a gang of small boys throwing stones would have put up a better fight.

In early January 1885 the Formosa expeditionary corps was substantially reinforced with two battalions of infantry, bringing its total strength to around 4,000 men. Four of the six companies of the 3rd African Light Infantry Battalion (chef de bataillon Fontebride) arrived in Keelung on 6 January, and all four companies of the 4th Foreign Legion Battalion (chef de bataillon Vitalis) disembarked on 20 January. Command of the expanded expeditionary corps was given to Lieutenant-Colonel Jacques Duchesne (1837–1918), the future conqueror of Madagascar, who had recently made his name in Tonkin by defeating Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army at Yu Oc (17 November 1884) and fighting his way through to the isolated French post of Tuyen Quang.

The African Battalion reinforcements soon blooded themselves, but not in accordance with Duchesne's plans. On 10 January 1885 a party of 15 bored zéphyrs under the command of Corporal Mourier escaped from their barracks and launched an impromptu attack on Le Cirque. Their aim, apparently, was to capture the Chinese flag floating above the ramparts of Fort Bamboo and bring it back to Keelung. Mourier and his men soon came under fire, and Fontebride was forced to commit all four companies of the battalion one after another to disengage them. By mid-afternoon the entire African Battalion was deployed in line, in the open, halfway up the slopes of Hung-tan-shan, exchanging fire with the Chinese defenders of Fort Bamboo. Courbet and Duchesne, furious at this reckless, unauthorised attack, ordered Fontebride to extricate the battalion immediately. French casualties in this 'reconnaissance' (as Courbet prudently called it in his official report) were 17 dead and 28 wounded. It is doubtful whether the Chinese lost a single man. The survivors of Mourier's party (several of them were killed during the attack) were jailed for 60 days.

Two weeks later the French attacked the Chinese lines in a more orderly manner. On 25 January 1885 Duchesne launched an offensive aimed at capturing the key Chinese position of La Table (Yueh-mei-shan). In three days of fighting the French captured the subsidiary position of Fork Y, enabling their artillery to enfilade the main Chinese defences, but on 28 January torrential rain halted the offensive before the French could assault La Table itself. A Chinese counterattack on Fork Y during the night of 31 January was decisively repulsed by the French with rifle fire at point-blank range. French casualties in the actions of 25 to 31 January were 21 dead and 62 wounded, mostly in the Legion and African battalions. Chinese casualties, mostly sustained in the disastrous counterattack on 31 January, probably amounted to at least 2,000 men. The dead included the battalion commander Chang Jen-kuei (張仁貴), a bandit chief from Ilan who had contributed a force of 200 militiamen to Ts’ao Chih-chung's command.

Duchesne was anxious to follow up this limited victory with a further attack on La Table but heavy rain continued throughout February. No serious troop movements were possible during this period. In mid-February the Chinese bombarded the French positions from La Table with Congreve rockets, but without doing any damage. French artillery fired back, and a lucky shot blew up an ammunition dump on La Table. Thereafter the Chinese left the French in peace.

French offensive, March 1885

Soldier of the Foreign Legion at Keelung, January 1885

The rain finally stopped on 2 March, and two days later Duchesne launched a second, highly-successful offensive. In a series of actions fought between 4 and 7 March, the French broke the Chinese encirclement of Keelung with a flank attack delivered against the east of the Chinese line, capturing the key position of La Table and forcing the Chinese to withdraw behind the Keelung River.

Duchesne committed 1,300 troops to his attack column. The column contained six companies of the 4th Legion and 3rd African battalions and three companies of marine infantry. Artillery support was provided by three guns under the command of Captain de Champglen and by the gunboat Vipère, which took up a position off Pei-tao from which it could bombard the Chinese positions on Yueh-mei-shan and in the Keelung River valley. On 4 March the French made a bold outflanking march eastwards towards Pei-tao, occupying the summits of Wu-k'eng-shan (五坑山) and Shen-ou-shan (深澳山). At dawn on 5 March they descended into the Shen-ou-k'eng (深澳坑) valley and marched southwards to place themselves dead on the flank of the Chinese line. In the early afternoon they scaled Liu-k'eng-shan (六坑山) from the east and laboriously ascended the eastern face of Yueh-mei-shan, approaching the Chinese positions without being spotted. Late in the afternoon they captured La Table with a simultaneous frontal and flanking attack, supported by rifle and artillery fire from the French forward positions on Fork Y. On 6 March the column, reinforced by two Legion companies previously stationed on Fork Y, paused to resupply with food and ammunition. On the morning of 7 March the French thrust westwards from Yueh-mei-shan and fought their way to the summit of Hung-tan-shan, where they stormed Fort Bamboo. In the afternoon they attacked southwards along the ridge of Niao-tsui-chien (鳥嘴尖), against fierce Chinese resistance, eventually driving the Chinese back through the village of Loan-loan (Nuan-nuan, 暖暖). On 8 March the French consolidated their positions around Loan-loan. On 9 March the Chinese withdrew from Shih-ch'iu-ling, which could no longer be held with Hung-tan-shan in French hands, and fell back behind the Keelung River.

French casualties in the March offensive were 41 killed and 157 wounded. Chinese losses may have amounted to around 1,500 killed and wounded. Duchesne's men had every reason to be proud of themselves. They had been asked to make an arduous approach march of more than 100 kilometres through unfamiliar countryside and then to fight two major battles in the confusing, heavily-wooded, mountainous terrain to the south of Keelung. They had succeeded magnificently, decisively disengaging Keelung. This spectacular victory, perhaps the most impressive French professional triumph of the Sino-French War, was overshadowed at the time by the news of the relief of the Siege of Tuyen Quang on 3 March 1885, and remains largely unknown to this day in France.

Duchesne's victory sparked a brief panic in Tai-pak-fu, but the French were not strong enough to advance beyond their bridgehead. The French occupied Hung-tan-shan and Yueh-mei-shan, replacing Fort Bamboo and La Table with two identically-named forts of their own. Two more forts, Fort Bertin and Southern Fort (Fort du Sud), were built above Loan-loan and on the lower slopes of Hung-tan-shan, overlooking the Keelung River. (The new French forts were designed and sited by the engineering captain Joseph Joffre, who would later become a Marshal of France and commander-in-chief of the French Army during World War I.) The Keelung Campaign now reached a point of equilibrium. The French were holding a virtually impregnable defensive perimeter around Keelung but could not exploit their success, while Liu Ming-ch'uan's army remained in presence just beyond their advanced positions.

Japanese interest in the Keelung campaign

The Japanese corvette Amagi

The French endeavours at Keelung were of great interest to another predatory power in the region, Japan. In 1874 the Japanese had sent a punitive expedition to southern Taiwan, following the murder of shipwrecked Japanese sailors by Taiwanese aborigines, and Japanese expansionists already had their eye on Taiwan as a future Japanese colony. Following the failure of the Gapsin Coup in Korea in December 1884, Japan began to look ahead to an eventual showdown with China. Although France and Japan never became formal allies during the Sino-French War (despite Chinese fears of such a possibility), Japan's naval and military leaders observed the performance of Admiral Courbet's squadron and Colonel Duchesne's Formosa expeditionary corps with keen professional interest. The Japanese captain Tōgō Heihachirō, the future commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, visited Keelung during the war aboard the corvette Amagi and was briefed by French officers on the tactics the French were using against the Chinese.

Pescadores campaign, March 1885

Duchesne's victory enabled Admiral Courbet to detach a marine infantry battalion from the Keelung garrison to capture the Pescadores Islands in late March. Strategically, the Pescadores Campaign was an important victory, which would have prevented the Chinese from further reinforcing their army in Formosa, but it came too late to affect the outcome of the war. Future French operations were cancelled on the news of Herbinger’s retreat from Langson on 28 March, and Courbet was on the point of evacuating Keelung to reinforce the Tonkin expeditionary corps, leaving only a minimum garrison at Makung in the Pescadores, when hostilities were ended in April by the conclusion of preliminaries of peace.

French evacuation of Keelung, June 1885

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The French Cemetery, Keelung

Courbet reversed his preparations for evacuating Keelung on hearing that hostilities had ended, and troops of the Formosa expeditionary corps continued to occupy Keelung and Makung for several months as a surety for the withdrawal of Chinese forces from Tonkin. Keelung was evacuated on 22 June 1885. At the request of Admiral Lespès, Liu Ming-ch'uan undertook to respect the cemetery in which the French war dead had been buried. This promise was kept, and the French cemetery in Keelung can still be seen today.

The French war dead, between 600 and 700 soldiers and sailors (most of them victims of cholera and typhoid rather than battle casualties), were originally buried in a cemetery further to the north, close to the Erh-sha-wan battery, and their remains were transferred to the present cemetery in the early years of the twentieth century. The present French cemetery contains only two named graves, those of sous-commissaire Dert and Lieutenant Jehenne. Ironically, these two marine infantry officers died not in Keelung but in Makung in the Pescadores Islands, in June 1885, and their remains were exhumed and transferred to the Keelung cemetery in 1954.

References

• Davidson, J. W., The Island of Formosa, Past and Present (London, 1903)
• Duboc, E., Trente cinq mois de campagne en Chine, au Tonkin (Paris, 1899)
• Ferrero, Stéphane, Formose, vue par un marin français du XIX^e siècle (Paris, 2005)
• Garnot, L'expédition française de Formose, 1884–1885 (Paris, 1894)
• Huard, La guerre du Tonkin (Paris, 1887)
• Loir, Maurice, L'escadre de l'amiral Courbet (Paris, 1886)
• Lung Chang [龍章], Yueh-nan yu Chung-fa chan-cheng [越南與中法戰爭, Vietnam and the Sino-French War] (Taipei, 1993)
• MacKay, G., From Far Formosa (Edinburgh and London, 1896)
• Poyen-Bellisle, H. de, L'artillerie de la Marine à Formose (Paris, 1888)
• Rollet de l'Isle, Maurice, Au Tonkin et dans les mers de Chine (Paris, 1886)
• Rouil, Christophe, Formose: des batailles presque oubliées (Taipei, 2001)
• Thirion, P., L'expédition de Formose (Paris, 1898)
• Thomazi, A., La conquête de l'Indochine (Paris, 1934)

See also

Amédée Courbet Battle of Fuzhou Battle of Shipu Battle of Zhenhai

Far East Squadron Pescadores Campaign Sino-French War