Tonkin campaign

BelligerentsFranceChina (until 1885)Strength 42,000 soldiers by September 1885 10,000 Vietnamese soldiers
3,000 Black Flag soldiers
50,000 Chinese soldiersCasualties and losses 4,222 killed or wounded At least 10,000 killed

The Tonkin campaign was an armed conflict fought between June 1883 and April 1886 by the French against, variously, the Vietnamese, Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army and the Chinese Guangxi and Yunnan armies to occupy Tonkin (northern Vietnam) and entrench a French protectorate there. The campaign, complicated in August 1884 by the outbreak of the Sino-French War and in July 1885 by the Cần Vương nationalist uprising in Annam (central Vietnam), which required the diversion of large numbers of French troops, was conducted by the , supported by the gunboats of the Tonkin Flotilla. The campaign officially ended in April 1886, when the expeditionary corps was reduced in size to a division of occupation, but Tonkin was not effectively pacified until 1896.