Security was also a Chinese concern. When a small French mili-
tary force seized Hanoi in April 1882, China reacted with vigour.
Chinese troops entered Vietnam while a Chinese naval force moved
into Vietnamese waters even before Vietnam sent a last desperate
appeal for assistance. In May 1883, the Black Flags ambushed and
killed the French commander of the Hanoi garrison, and France went
on the offensive. Meanwhile, the old Vietnamese emperor, Tu Duc,
had died and the court was in turmoil. The French occupied Hue and
advanced into Tonking where they were opposed by combined Viet-
namese and Black Flag forces. Negotiations proved fruitless as France
was determined to take control of Vietnam while the Qing court con-
tinued to insist that Vietnam remained tributary to China.
August 1884 saw the outbreak of the undeclared Sino–French
war. French naval vessels bombarded Fuzhou and attacked Taiwan. In
Vietnam, however, Chinese forces drove the French out of Lang-son,
and France agreed to negotiations. These resulted in the Treaty of
Tianjin signed in June 1885, which recognised Vietnam as a protec-
torate of France. Vietnam’s relations with foreign powers, including
China, would henceforth be conducted through the French Ministry
of Foreign Affairs.
Thus was this closest of all tributary relationships in Southeast
Asia brought to a close, a decade before Japanese invasion did the same
for Korea. In 1886 Britain annexed Upper Burma, and in 1893 Siam
ceded the Lao territories to France. China had lost all her protective
ring of tributary states, and instead faced European imperial powers on
her northern (Russia) and southern (Britain and France) borders, not
to mention an aggressive Japan to the east. Not only was the Chinese
world order at an end, but by being forced to define national bound-
aries within which it would exist as a nation-state and beyond which
it would have no further claim, China was drawn inexorably into the
Western world order.
Much of the impetus for the French conquest of northern
Vietnam and the British occupation of Upper Burma came from a
Enter the Europeans