Pescadores Campaign (1885) - The French Occupation of The Pescadores

The French Occupation of The Pescadores

Makung became the main base for Courbet's Far East Squadron for the remainder of the war and during a brief period of occupation in the summer of 1885. The Sino-French War ended in April 1885, and under the terms of the peace settlement the French continued to occupy the Pescadores until July, as a surety for the withdrawal of the Chinese armies from Tonkin. Makung Bay was a superb natural harbour, and many of the squadron's officers hoped that France would retain its recent conquest as a counterweight to the British colony of Hong Kong. They even renamed the islands the îles des Pêcheurs ('the fishermen's islands', a French version of the Portuguese name 'Pescadores') in anticipation of their future destiny as a French colony. This was never a realistic prospect. France had fought the war to oust the Chinese from Tonkin, not to make colonial conquests in China itself, and the French punctiliously evacuated the Pescadores on 22 July 1885.

Courbet issued strict instructions that his troops should pay for everything they needed, and the islanders seized the opportunity to make as much money as possible out of the occupying forces during their brief sojourn in the Pescadores. Food markets sprang up around the French cantonments. The French were also interested in buying exotic reminders of their stay in the Far East, and local entrepreneurs, including the abbots of Buddhist monasteries, hastened to satisfy their demand for bronze Buddhas, carved screens and other characteristic souvenirs.

During their occupation the French surveyed the coastal waters around the islands and considerably improved the rudimentary facilities of Makung harbour. Meanwhile, during the summer of 1885, nearly thirty French warships of the Far East Squadron rode peacefully at anchor off Makung, in the largest concentration of French naval power in the Far East in the history of the French Navy.

Several dozen French soldiers and sailors succumbed to cholera during the French occupation of the Pescadores. Cholera broke out within one or two days of the landing, and by 23 April 15 men had died and a further 20 had been hospitalised. The disease had probably been brought over from Keelung by the marine infantry of Lange's battalion, but the French suspected that it originated in Makung, whose Chinese population lived in cramped and insanitary conditions. Courbet therefore isolated the French cantonments from contact with any possible contagion from Makung. All Chinese houses within a certain distance were demolished to create a cordon sanitaire around the French barracks, several nearby mosquito-ridden streams were filled in, and each barrack hut was disinfected with iron sulphate and phenic acid. These precautions gradually brought the disease under control, and most of the French troops hospitalised in April recovered in May.

However, the precautions came too late for Admiral Courbet himself, who contracted cholera at the beginning of June and died aboard his flagship Bayard in Makung harbour on the night of 11 June 1885. Courbet's body was taken back to France for a state funeral, but the other French dead were buried in two cemeteries at Makung, one for the marine infantry of Lange's battalion and the other for the sailors of the Far East Squadron.

Two commemorative obelisks erected in the summer of 1885 in these cemeteries can still be seen. One is in Makung itself, the other on the tip of the southern cape that encloses Makung harbour, formerly known as Dutch Point (from the ruins of an old Dutch fort there). Both bear almost identical inscriptions: A la memoire des soldats français décedés à Makung ('To the memory of the French soldiers who died at Makung'). A third obelisk, erected by Admiral Sébastien Lespès as a monument to Courbet's memory, was removed in 1954, but its marble inscription has been preserved: A la memoire de l'amiral Courbet et des braves morts pour la France aux Pescadores en 1885 ('To the memory of Admiral Courbet and the brave men who died for France in the Pescadores in 1885').

The bodies of two marine infantry officers who died of cholera in early June 1885, sous-commissaire Marie-Joseph-Louis Dert and Lieutenant Louis Jehenne, were originally buried in front of Courbet's monument (Courbet had attended their funerals only days before his own death). In 1954, under an agreement reached between the French and ROC governments, their remains were exhumed with full military honours and transferred to the French Cemetery at Keelung aboard the national frigate Commandant Pimodan, where they rest today alongside their old comrades in the Formosa Expeditionary Corps and the Far East Squadron.