The battle was fought on 23 August 1884 off the Pagoda Anchorage in Mawei (馬尾) harbour, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) to the southeast of the city of Fuzhou (Foochow).

On 11 May 1884 French and Chinese negotiators concluded the Tientsin Accord, an agreement designed to end several months of undeclared hostilities between France and China in Tonkin.

On 23 June 1884, French troops advancing to occupy Lạng Sơn, in accordance with the terms of this agreement, clashed near the small town of Bắc Lệ with a detachment of the Chinese Guangxi Army.

[2] Negotiations between France and China broke down in mid-August, and on the evening of 22 August Courbet was authorised by the French government to commence hostilities.

He duly notified the foreign consuls, the governor-general of Fujian and Zhejiang, and the commanders of several neutral warships moored at the Pagoda Anchorage (the British gunboats HMS Vigilant, Champion and Sapphire and the American corvette USS Enterprise).

[4] The second-class cruiser Châteaurenault and the troopship Saône had been left at the Jinpai pass, at the entrance to the Min River, to stop the Chinese from laying a barrage to prevent the squadron's escape.

The Chinese defence was under the command of the imperial commissioner Zhang Peilun (張佩綸), one of the leading members of China's war party.

Once the attack by the torpedo boats had cleared the way, the gunboats Aspic, Vipère and Lynx would sail upriver towards the Navy Yard and take on the other ships of the Chinese northern group.

[9][10] On the morning of Saturday 23 August, although the Chinese commanders knew that the French would launch their attack at around 2:00 pm, the sailors in both fleets went about their routine business.

Lieutenant Latour had been seriously wounded in the eye during the attack, but he refused an offer of medical assistance from American officers on Enterprise, explaining that he could not leave his post while the battle was still in progress.

Chenhang, Yongbao, Feiyun, Ji'an, Fusheng and Jiansheng were either sunk or set alight by shellfire from the cruisers Duguay-Trouin, Villars and d'Estaing.

Only Fupo and Yixin survived the battle without serious damage, by escaping upriver before the gunboats Lynx, Aspic and Vipère had a chance to engage them.

Before they were put out of action the outgunned Chinese vessels concentrated their fire on the French flagship Volta, hoping to kill Courbet and the officers of his entourage.

The fighting ended at 5:00 pm, but during the night of 23 August the Chinese made a number of unsuccessful attacks with fireships on the French warships, obliging some of them to shift their anchorages to evade them.

On the morning of 24 August Courbet issued orders for his ships' landing companies to go ashore with the naval engineers to destroy the Foochow Navy Yard.

Preparations were made for a landing, but Courbet then changed his mind, after observing that the Navy Yard was defended by organised groups of Chinese infantry.

Instead, the French bombarded the Foochow Navy Yard, damaging a number of outbuildings and holing the sloop Henghai (Heng-hai, 橫海), still under construction and lying on the slips.

However, before its guns were destroyed the White Fort was able to inflict moderate damage on the French ironclad La Galissonnière, which had sailed up from Keelung to join Courbet's squadron and attempted unsuccessfully to fight its way into the Min River.

French officers aboard Châteaurenault, anchored near the entrance to the Min River, saw three Chinese warships drifting downriver on the evening of 23 August, abandoned by their crews and blazing from stem to stern.

The Chinese imperial commissioner Zhang Peilun, who made no serious attempt to coordinate the resistance of the Fujian fleet, was degraded after the battle and replaced by the veteran general Zuo Zongtang (左宗棠).

The Manchu General of Fuzhou Mutušan (穆圖善), who had directed the defence of the Jinpai pass on 27 and 28 August with skill and energy, kept his job.

The Chinese battleships were more powerful than any of the ships under Courbet's command, and in December 1883, foreseeing that war with China was imminent, the French persuaded the German government to detain them in the event of hostilities.

The German government invented a number of plausible excuses for keeping the two battleships in port, and they remained in Germany for the duration of the Sino-French War.

Feiyun and Ji'an, two Fujian vessels which had been loaned to the Guangdong Fleet in 1882 to observe French movements in the Gulf of Tonkin, were sent back to Fuzhou in early August by Zhang Zhidong, the governor-general of the two Guangs, arriving just in time to share the fate of their comrades in the forthcoming battle.