The Keelung campaign (August 1884–April 1885) was a military campaign undertaken by French forces in northern Formosa (Taiwan) during the Sino-French War. After making a botched attack on Keelung in August 1884, the French landed an expeditionary corps of 4,500 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 10,000 men, the French won two 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.
Background
Following the defeat of China's Guangxi Army by the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps in the Bắc Ninh campaign (March 1884), a two-year confrontation between France and China in northern Vietnam was ended on 11 May 1884 by the conclusion of the Tientsin Accord, under which the Chinese undertook to withdraw their troops from Vietnam and to recognise a French protectorate in Tonkin. However, the hopes aroused by this agreement, which seemed to have brought France's Tonkin campaign to a victorious end, were shattered on 23 June 1884 by the Bắc Lệ ambush, in which a French column advancing to occupy Lạng Sơn and other frontier towns was attacked near Bắc Lệ by a detachment of the Guangxi Army.
When news of the 'Bắc Lệ Ambush' reached Paris, there was fury at what was perceived as blatant Chinese treachery. Jules Ferry's government demanded an apology, an indemnity, and the immediate implementation of the terms of the Tientsin Accord. The Chinese government agreed to negotiate, but refused to apologise or pay an indemnity. The mood in France was against compromise, and although negotiations continued throughout July, Admiral Amédée Courbet, the commander of France's newly created Far East Squadron, was ordered to take his ships to Fuzhou (Foochow). He was instructed to prepare to attack the Chinese fleet in the harbour and to destroy the Foochow Navy Yard. Meanwhile, as a demonstration of what would follow if the Chinese remained recalcitrant, Courbet was ordered on 2 August to despatch a naval force to the port of Keelung in northern Formosa, destroy its coastal defences, and occupy the town as a 'pledge' (gage) to be bargained against a Chinese withdrawal from Tonkin.
Failed French landing at Keelung, August 1884
French interest in Keelung dated from February 1884, when Admiral Sébastien Lespès, the commander of France's Far East naval division, had recommended its occupation in the event of a war between France and China on the grounds that it could be easily seized and easily held. When this recommendation was made, Keelung was poorly defended. As tension between France and China grew in July 1884 the garrison of Keelung was substantially increased and the town's defences improved, and in August 1884 it was no longer the easy target it had been six months earlier. Its inner harbour was defended by three shore batteries: the recently completed Ta-sha-wan Battery (大沙灣砲台), boasted by the Chinese to be impregnable; the Ehr-sha-wan battery on the eastern side of the harbour; and a third battery on the seaward slope of Mount Clement (Huo-hao-shan, 火號山), a prominent hill to the west of the town. By the end of July 1884 there were 5,000 Chinese soldiers stationed in northern Formosa, deployed around the ports of Keelung and Tamsui. The appointment of Liu Mingchuan as imperial commissioner for Formosa in July 1884 also underscored the determination of the Qing government to defend Formosa. Liu was a veteran military commander, who had distinguished himself in the Taiping Rebellion.
Liu Mingchuan was aware that Keelung and the nearby port of Tamsui were likely targets for a French attack, and made sensible defensive dispositions to oppose a landing at both towns. He stationed 2,500 Chinese troops around Keelung, the likeliest target, under the command of the generals Sun Kaihua and Su Desheng, while he himself remained with the other half of his army at Tai-pak-fu (modern Taipei), occupying a central position that would allow him to move quickly either to Tamsui or to Keelung once the French threat developed.
Admiral Courbet, then aboard the French cruiser Volta in the Min River, received the French government's order to attack Keelung on the evening of 2 August. He entrusted this mission to Admiral Lespès, his second-in-command, who left the Min River the following morning aboard the gunboat Lutin to meet the ironclads Bayard and La Galissonnière off the island of Matsu. At Matsu, Lespès transferred Bayard's landing company to his flagship La Galissonnière, and on the night of 3 August crossed the Formosa Strait with La Galissonnière and Lutin. The two French ships arrived off Keelung on the morning of 4 August, where the cruiser Villars was already waiting for them.
On the morning of 5 August, after the Chinese rejected a French ultimatum to hand over their coastal defences, La Galissonnière, Villars and Lutin engaged and disabled Keelung's three coastal 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 body of Chinese troops led by Liu Mingchuan forced the French to make a fighting withdrawal and re-embark on 6 August. French casualties in this unsuccessful operation were 2 dead and 11 wounded. The Chinese suffered markedly heavier casualties.
The Chinese forts around Keelung contained 5 178mm guns in Fort Ehr-sha-wan and 3 48lb guns in Fort Ta-sha-wan with an unspecified amount of guns in Fort Huahaoshan.
French strategic debate, September 1884
In the wake of the Battle of Fuzhou (23 August 1884), which inaugurated the nine-month Sino-French War, the French decided to make a second attempt to put pressure on China by seizing Keelung. Admiral Courbet argued vigorously against a campaign in Formosa and submitted alternative proposals for a campaign in northern Chinese waters to seize either Port Arthur or Weihaiwei. He was supported by Jules Patenôtre, the French minister to China.
Courbet's proposals, although militarily attractive, were too ambitious for the French government to stomach. 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. A limited operation to seize Keelung, on the other hand, could be undertaken with the forces already at Courbet's disposal. The town could be taken and held by a relatively small French force, and with its nearby coal mines would make an admirable wartime base for the Far East Squadron. A victory at Keelung would also avenge the failure of 6 August. The decision to attack Keelung was made by the French cabinet on 18 September 1884. For good measure, the cabinet also sanctioned an attack on nearby Tamsui, provided that the town could be captured without damage to European commercial interests.
French capture of Keelung, 1 October 1884
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 Cochinchina. 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, and a scratch battery of two 80-millimetre (3.1 in) mountain guns and 4 Hotchkiss canons-revolvers. A small force of Vietnamese porters accompanied the combatants.
The men of the expeditionary corps sailed from Saigon and Along Bay in the third week of September aboard the state transports Nive, Tarn and Drac and joined the Far East Squadron off the island of Matsu on 29 September. The three troopships were escorted on the final leg of their journey by the ironclad Bayard. On the morning of 30 September the invasion force arrived off Keelung. Courbet scouted the Chinese defences during the afternoon, and gave orders for an opposed landing on the following morning.
At dawn on 1 October Ber's marine infantry battalion was put ashore to the west of Keelung, at the foot of Mount Clement. Supported by naval gunfire from several ships of Courbet's Far East Squadron, the French scaled Mount Clement and established a defensive position on its summit, 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 (Chinese: 六堵; pinyin: Liù-dǔ), astride the road to Tamsui, and retreated to Tai-pak-fu with the rest on 3 October. It was rumoured that he intended to flee south to Tek-cham (Hsinchu), 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 Lungshan temple.
Liu Mingchuan took measures to reinforce Tamsui, in the river nine torpedo mines were planted and the entrance was blocked with ballast boats filled with stone which were sunk on September 3, matchlock armed "Hakka hill people" were used to reinforce the mainland Chinese battalion, and around the British Consulate and Customs House at the Red Fort hilltop, Shanghai Arsenal manufactured Krupp guns were used to form an additional battery.