Sino-French War

The Sino-French War (Chinese: 中法戰争; pinyin: Zhōng fǎ Zhànzhēng, French: Guerre franco-chinoise, Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Pháp-Thanh), also known as the Tonkin War and Tonquin War, was a limited conflict fought between August 1884 and April 1885 to decide whether France should replace China in control of Tonkin (northern Vietnam). Because the French achieved their war aims, they are usually considered to have won the war. Nevertheless, the Chinese armies performed better than they did in other nineteenth-century foreign wars, and some Chinese and Taiwanese historians dispute this view. The Taiwanese scholar Lung Chang, for example, has claimed the Sino-French War as 'the Qing Dynasty's sole victory in arms against a foreign opponent' (清朝對外用兵唯一以勝利結束之戰爭).