The Sino-French War in Taiwan: Eight Months at Keelung and Tamsui

30-second overview: From 1884 to 1885, France brought war to Taiwan in its bid to control northern Vietnam. French forces occupied Keelung for seven months, blockaded every island port, and seized the Pescadores — yet never broke through the Tamsui defenses and never fought their way out of the hills and trenches around Keelung. When hostilities ended, France took Vietnam and gave up Formosa. The war made the Qing court recognize Taiwan's strategic value, and the following year it was elevated to a standalone province. A war "won but unwanted" inadvertently launched Taiwan's modernization.

Tamsui: Two Hours

On the afternoon of October 8, 1884, 600 French sailors landed at Tamsui (Hobe) under naval gunfire support¹. Their objective was to seize this port and form a north-south pincer with Keelung.

Defending commander Sun Kai-hua had roughly 2,500 men — four battalions plus emergency-recruited militia². He had sunk wooden junks packed with rocks in the river mouth to form a breakwater barrier, with sea mines scattered inside and outside the barricade. After the French landed and charged the White Fort, they ran straight into Sun Kai-hua's main force. Qing troops flanked them from both sides; the French formation crumbled, and within less than two hours they were driven back to sea³.

French casualties: 17 killed, 49 wounded. Qing casualties: approximately 80 killed, 200 wounded. The figures were not large, but the significance far exceeded any casualty count: it was one of the rare French defeats in the entire Sino-French War⁴. When news reached Beijing, the war hawks regained the upper hand.

French officer Eugène Garnot later wrote of that day's other face in his memoirs: "The heads of our sailors, severed by the enemy, were carried through the streets of Tamsui by a mob of frenzied crowds amid cheers and celebration."⁵ Victory has its glorious side, and its savage side.

Why France Attacked Taiwan

The cause of the war had nothing to do with Taiwan. In 1883, France moved to incorporate northern Vietnam (Tonkin) into its colonial empire; the Qing sent troops south to resist. After over a year of fighting in Vietnam, France decided to open a second front to apply pressure⁶.

The logic was simple: seize the Keelung coal mines, cut off fuel supplies along the Qing's southeastern coast, and force Beijing to the negotiating table. French Far East Squadron commander Vice Admiral Amédée Courbet was ordered to execute the plan.

On August 5, 1884, French Rear Admiral Lespès shelled Keelung harbor, destroying three Qing gun emplacements⁷. The next day French forces landed, but Qing Imperial Commissioner Liu Ming-chuan led 2,000 troops in a counterattack and drove the landing party back to their ships. This was the first French retreat on Formosa.

On October 1, 1,800 French marines landed at Keelung again under naval support fire. This time Liu Ming-chuan could not hold the harbor. But before withdrawing, he did one thing: he ordered the coal mine machinery destroyed and all stored coal wrecked⁸. The French took the port and found nothing. The coal they needed still had to be shipped from Hong Kong.

Seven Months Trapped at the Harbor

After occupying Keelung, the French bogged down. They controlled the harbor, but were surrounded by hills. Qing troops had constructed kilometers of earthwork fortifications (trenches) on the ridges encircling Keelung — from Ruifang's Bajuzhar Mountain, Daguo Mountain, Dingnei-jian, and Dingliao Mountain all the way to Liudu Mountain⁹. Remnants of these fortifications can still be found today.

French troop strength never exceeded 3,000; they could not break through the defensive line. The Qing brought in continuous reinforcements from the mainland; by the war's end, total troops on Taiwan had reached 35,000¹⁰. Liu Ming-chuan's strategy was clear: hold the hills and keep them pinned at the harbor.

Curator's Note
The most counterintuitive aspect of this war: France's navy dominated the seas globally, but a navy cannot fight a mountain war. Qing forces could not win a single naval engagement, yet they did not need to. A distant expeditionary force's fatal vulnerability is not the enemy's guns — it is the length of its supply lines and tropical disease. A 2024 RAND Corporation report and a 2025 RSIS paper both point to the same conclusion: naval superiority does not equal ground control¹¹.

French military medical assistant René Coppin recorded the realities of those months in letters to his mother: he had thought this would be an inconsequential expedition, but Keelung averaged four deaths per day from cholera and typhoid¹². November and December 1884 were the worst period — disease was consuming more men than combat.

Christmas on the Blockade Line

France simultaneously imposed a naval blockade of the entire island. Approximately 20 warships patrolled Taiwan's surrounding waters, intercepting every vessel entering or leaving¹³. This was the first time in modern Taiwan's history that a foreign navy had imposed a complete blockade.

But the blockade was not airtight. Smuggling ships ran at night to evade patrols; some vessels circled around to Taitung and then transferred cargo overland to the north; some even "sold" their ships to Americans and flew American flags, since French forces dared not intercept vessels of neutral nations for fear of triggering an international incident¹⁴.

The blockade hit hardest at Tamsui's tea export trade. British tea merchant John Dodd wrote in his diary on December 1, 1884: "No mail, no packages, no drinks. How are we to pass Christmas?"¹⁵ The war had not just trapped soldiers — it had trapped all the foreign civilians in Taiwan.

The Death of Courbet

At the end of March 1885, Courbet led his fleet to seize the Pescadores. Within three days he had bombarded Makung harbor, landed troops, and seized Snake Head Mountain; the Pescadores defenders collapsed¹⁶. But within one or two days of landing, cholera broke out in the camps. Within three weeks, 15 men were dead and 20 hospitalized.

Courbet himself had contracted severe dysentery by April. On June 8, he attended the funeral of an aide-de-camp who had just died of cholera in the blazing Pescadores sun; his health deteriorated rapidly. On the night of June 11, Courbet died on his flagship Bayard, age 58¹⁷.

Garnot recorded in his memoirs: "The news of the Admiral's death fell like a bolt from the blue — the shock and grief were beyond all description. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, soldiers' cheeks were silently wet with tears."¹⁸

The Treaty: France Takes Vietnam, Not Taiwan

Ceasefire on April 4, 1885. On June 9, Li Hung-chang and French representatives signed the Convention of Tientsin in Tianjin. The Qing recognized France's suzerainty over Vietnam; France withdrew from Keelung and the Pescadores¹⁹.

France had held the military upper hand: it had occupied Keelung, occupied the Pescadores, and blockaded the entire island. But at the negotiating table, they chose Vietnam over Taiwan. From France's perspective, Taiwan was only a bargaining chip, not a goal. From Liu Ming-chuan's perspective, holding out for seven months in the Keelung hills was precisely for this day.

✦ "The French won every battle but couldn't answer what they had actually gained. The Qing didn't win any naval engagement but didn't lose anything either."

"Xizai Fan": Even the Gods Went to War

The Taiwanese folk name for this conflict is "Xizai Fan" (西仔反). "Xizai" means Western people (French); "Fan" means armed uprising²⁰.

On the eve of the Battle of Tamsui, residents brought out the statue of Qingshui Patriarch (清水祖師) to aid in the fight. After the Qing's victory there, the Guangxu Emperor bestowed an imperial plaque reading "Merit Accomplishing Relief" (功資拯濟), still hanging in the main hall of Bangka Patriarch Temple today²¹. This sparked a dispute between factions of devotees in Bangka and Tamsui over which community the statue belonged to, eventually resolved by an agreement to rotate custody. 140 years later, both communities are still honoring that agreement.

Curator's Note
The Sino-French War is one of the few 19th-century international conflicts that survived in Taiwan's local memory. Most Taiwanese don't know "Xizai Fan," but residents of Tamsui and Keelung do. Imperial commendations of divine statues, rotating ritual custody between two communities, French warships painted on temple walls: war memory in Taiwan is not transmitted through textbooks — it is transmitted through divine processions.

Aftermath: Taiwan Becomes a Province

The greatest consequence of the Sino-French War was not on the battlefield but in governance. The war made the Qing court recognize that Taiwan was not merely an appendage of Fujian Province — it was territory with independent strategic value. In 1885, Taiwan was separated from Fujian Province and became the 20th province of the Qing Empire. Liu Ming-chuan was appointed as the first Governor of Taiwan²².

Liu Ming-chuan served six years (1885–1891), launching Taiwan's first wave of modernization. He built the railway from Keelung to Hsinchu (approximately 107 km; construction began 1887, full line completed 1893); laid a submarine telegraph cable from Taipei to Fuzhou; established postal services; opened Western-style schools; and carried out land surveys²³. His modernization program predated Japanese colonial-era construction by ten years — yet after Liu Ming-chuan resigned due to illness in 1891, most of his projects stalled.

Echoes 140 Years Later

Keelung has a French military cemetery. Approximately 600 French officers, soldiers, and sailors are buried there: roughly 120 killed in action, 150 who died of wounds, and the rest dead of malaria, cholera, and dysentery²⁴. French expatriates visit to lay wreaths three times a year — in May, July, and November.

In December 2024, the RAND Corporation published an analysis using the 1884–1885 French assault on Taiwan as a case study to discuss the current Taiwan Strait situation. In 2025, the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore published a similar paper. Both reports reached similar conclusions: even facing an adversary with overwhelming naval superiority, defenders can exhaust invaders through terrain exploitation, defense in depth, and a war of attrition²⁵. What Liu Ming-chuan did in the Keelung hills 140 years ago was written into 21st-century military analysis reports.

Eight years after the war ended, Garnot finished his memoirs in Paris. At the end he posed a question: "We and a small number of brave comrades fought against enemies who vastly outnumbered us, enduring humiliating fatigue and a climate that destroyed our bodies — yet despite all this we frequently won. But what conclusions can we draw from these ten months of futile effort and glorious battle?"²⁶

France took Vietnam. The Qing kept Taiwan. Six hundred French soldiers stayed in Keelung. Garnot's question still has no answer.

Further reading:

• Qing Dynasty Rule in Taiwan — The historical context in which the Sino-French War took place: the full picture of treaty port openings and foreign powers entering Formosa
• Taiwan Railway History — The Keelung-to-Hsinchu railway that Liu Ming-chuan built after the war: Taiwan's point of departure for rail history
• Charles Le Gendre — Another foreign diplomat who left his mark on Formosa in the same era; his intelligence was later used by Japan to send troops to Taiwan
• Robert Swinhoe — Twenty years before the Sino-French War, the first British consul stationed in Taiwan was doing something entirely different on the same soil

References