page_title: Keelung campaign
section_title: French defeat at Tamsui, 8 October 1884
hierarchical_section_title: Keelung campaign / French defeat at Tamsui, 8 October 1884
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of the action at Tamsui, 8 October 1884, by Captain Garnot
context_page_description: The Keelung campaign was a controversial military campaign undertaken by the French in northern Formosa 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.
context_section_description: 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.  Tamsui had a large foreign population at this period, and many of the town's European residents formed picnic parties and flocked to vantage points on the nearby hills to watch the unfolding battle.
  The French attack soon began to falter.  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 replaced the officer originally scheduled to command the attack at the last moment, lost control of his men in the thick undergrowth in front of the Chinese forts. The French line gradually lost its cohesion and ammunition began to run short.  The Chinese forces at Tamsui, numbering around 1,000 men, were under the command of the generals Sun Kaihua and Zhang Gaoyuan. Seeing the French in confusion, Sun Kaihua 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 repulse at Tamsui was one of the rare French defeats in the Sino-French War, and had immediate political significance.  China's war party had been placed on the defensive after the loss of China's Fujian fleet in the Battle of Fuzhou on 23 August 1884, but the unexpected Chinese victory at Tamsui six weeks later bolstered the position of the hardliners in the Qing court.  The court thereupon decided to continue the war against France until the French withdrew their demand for the payment of an indemnity for the Bắc Lệ ambush, rejecting an American offer of mediation made shortly after the battle.  This decision ensured that the Sino-French War would continue for several more months, with increasing losses and expenditure on both sides.
  The Chinese took prisoner and beheaded 11 French marines who were injured in addition to La Gailissonniere's captain Fontaine and used bamboo poles to display the heads in public, to incite anti-French feelings in China pictures of the decapitation of the Frenchmen were published in the Tien-shih-tsai Pictorial Journal in Shanghai.
  "A most unmistakable scene in the market place occurred. Some six heads of Frenchmen, heads of the true French type were exhibited, much to the disgust of foreigners. A few visited the place where they were stuck up, and were glad to leave it—not only on account of the disgusting and barbarous character of the scene, but because the surrounding crowd showed signs of turbulence. At the camp also were eight other Frenchmen's heads, a sight which might have satisfied a savage or a Hill-man, but hardly consistent with the comparatively enlightened tastes, one would think, of Chinese soldiers even of to-day. It is not known how many of the French were killed and wounded; fourteen left their bodies on shore, and no doubt several wounded were taken back to the ships. (Chinese accounts state that twenty were killed and large numbers wounded.)
  In the evening Captain Boteler and Consul Frater called on General Sun, remonstrating with him on the subject of cutting heads off, and allowing them to be exhibited. Consul Frater wrote him a despatch on the subject strongly deprecating such practices, and we understand that the general promised it should not occur again, and orders were at once given to bury the heads. It is difficult for a general even situated as Sun is—having to command troops like the Hillmen, who are the veriest savages in the treatment of their enemies—to prevent such barbarities.
  
  "It is said the Chinese buried the dead bodies of the Frenchmen after the engagement on 8th instant by order of General Sun. The Chinese are in possession of a machine gun taken or found on the beach.
  — James W. Davidson, The island of Formosa, pa
caption: The action of 8 October 1884 at Tamsui (map by Captain Garnot of the 3rd African Battalion)
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