The Sino-French War is a limited conflict fought between August 1884 and April 1885 to decide whether France should replace China in control of Tonkin (northern Vietnam).

Li seeks French acceptance of Chinese suzerainty over Annam, but the result of the Sino-French War is that French suzerainty is substituted for that of China.

As the French achieve their war aims, they are usually considered to have won the war.

But the French triumph is marred by a number of defeats, and the Chinese armies perform rather better than they had in China’s other nineteenth-century foreign wars.

The war hastens the emergence of a strong nationalist movement in China, and some Chinese scholars have even hailed the Sino-French War as ‘the Qing dynasty’s sole victory in arms against a foreign opponent'.