[1] The Pescadores were occupied by the French until July 1885 and Admiral Courbet, by then a national hero in France, died aboard his flagship Bayard in Makung harbour during the occupation.

Courbet had wanted to mount an expedition to capture the Pescadores for several months, but the feasibility of the operation depended on the progress of the Keelung Campaign.

Colonel Jacques Duchesne's defeat of Liu Mingchuan's forces and capture of the key Chinese position of La Table on 7 March 1885 finally disengaged Keelung, allowing the French to detach troops from its garrison for a descent on the Pescadores.

[3][Note 1] The Chinese garrison of the Pescadores, which had been substantially reinforced at the beginning of 1885, was commanded by the generals Zhou Shanchu [zh] and Zheng Yingjie (鄭膺杰), and numbered around 2,400 men.

The Chinese had also built a battery armed with smoothbore cannon to sweep the plain to the east of Makung and a large entrenched camp to the north of the town to house the regular troops of the island's garrison.

[7] In the late afternoon Lange's battalion was put ashore on the southern cape of P'eng-hu Island, at Dome Hill, where it set up a defensive position for the night.

The British missionary William Campbell described the impact of the battle on the town's inhabitants: One quiet afternoon during the spring of 1885 the people of Formosa were startled on hearing what seemed to them the sound of distant thunder.

Those fortifications were mounted with good-sized guns of foreign make, and occupied by several thousands of soldiers who had been hastily called from various centres on the mainland.

Indeed, some say that on witnessing the fearful havoc caused by this opening volley from the French guns, both officers and men began to scamper off from the entrenchments; a statement which, however, cannot be altogether correct, since the number of soldiers suffering from frontal wounds, who afterwards found their way to the mission hospital at [Taiwanfu] showed conclusively that not a few of those poor matter-of-fact Chinamen must have made a noble stand against the invaders of their country.

Although it was a minor operation compared with the capture of Sơn Tây or the Battle of Fuzhou, in the eyes of his officers it was his most flawless military achievement.

[16] The news of the French capture of the Pescadores initially caused little stir in Paris, as the headlines in early April 1885 were monopolised by the so-called 'Tonkin affair' (the collapse of Jules Ferry's government on 30 March 1885 in the wake of the retreat from Lạng Sơn).

The Guangxi Army commanders Wang Debang and Feng Zicai, whose forces had recently won a notable victory in the battle of Bang Bo (24 March 1885) and reoccupied Lạng Sơn, received the order to cease fire with consternation.

The court replied firmly on 10 April 1885 that it was necessary to make peace immediately because the loss of the Pescadores placed the whole of Taiwan in jeopardy: The [Guangxi] Army has recovered Lạng Sơn, but the French now occupy P'eng-hu.

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.

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.

[18] 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.

[19] 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.

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.

[24] 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.