Marie Joseph François Garnier (Vietnamese: Ngạc Nhi; 25 July 1839 – 21 December 1873) was a French officer, inspector of Indigenous Affairs of Cochinchina and explorer.

[2] In early 1860, 20 years old Garnier, then serving as an aspirant on the Duperré during the Second Opium War, jumped into a stormy sea at night to save the life of a cavalry lieutenant who had fallen overboard.

[4] After some time spent in France, Garnier returned to the East, and in 1862, he was appointed inspector of native affairs in Cochinchina, and entrusted with the administration of Cholon, a suburb of Saigon.

In the course of the expedition – to quote the words of Sir Roderick Murchison addressed to the youthful traveller when, in 1870, he was presented with the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London[5] – "from Kratié in Cambodia to Shanghai 5392 miles were traversed, and of these, 3625 miles, chiefly of country unknown to European geography, were surveyed with care, and the positions fixed by astronomical observations, nearly the whole of the observations being taken by Garnier himself".

[6][7] Volunteering to lead a detachment to Dali, the capital of Sultan Suleiman, the sovereign of the Muslim rebels in Yunnan, Garnier successfully carried out the more-than-adventurous enterprise.

The preparation of his narrative was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War During the siege of Paris, Garnier served as principal staff officer to the admiral in command of the eighth sector.

[1] One day, while he was carrying a wagon full of ammunitions to the Fort of Vanves alongside 40 fellow fighters, the convoy came under a brutal rain of Prussian shells.

Emboldened by this crushing victory, Garnier and his men soon launched an unsanctioned military campaign that resulted in the conquest of the entire Red River Delta within two weeks.

[19] Completely overwhelmed by the lightning French conquest, the Vietnamese authorities had sought the help of Liu Yongfu and his Black Flag Army, a group of Chinese outlaws, composed largely of veterans of the Taiping Rebellion, who had settled in Northern Vietnam.

The youthful enseigne de vaisseau Adrien Balny d'Avricourt led an equally small column out of the citadel to support Garnier, but was also killed at the head of his men.

[20][21] Colonel Thomazi, the historian of French Indochina, gave the following detailed description of Garnier's last moments: At midday on 21 December he was in conference with the ambassadors when an interpreter ran up, announcing that bands of Black Flags were attacking the town by the western gate.

He then fired the six rounds from his revolver in an attempt to rescue himself, but the bandits surrounded him, pierced him with thrusts of sabres and lances, cut off his head, odiously mutilated his corpse, and ran away.

[23] However, the conquest had not been allowed by the French authorities, and another lieutenant named Paul-Louis-Félix Philastre had been sent to terminate the campaign as soon as the news of Garnier's attack on Hanoi reached Saigon.

In 1883, nine years after Francis Garnier's death, the French naval officer Henri Rivière was also killed by the Black Flags in Tonkin, in remarkably similar circumstances.

During the siege of Tuyên Quang (November 1884–March 1885), Liu Yung-fu's Black Flags, who formed part of the besieging Chinese army, taunted the men of the French garrison by chanting the names of their two most famous victims: 'Garnier!