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French Map of The Gulf of Tonkin at the End of the Sino-French War.
Fine, large map of the Tonkin Delta region, published in France following the close of the Sino-French war in June of 1885.
This impressive two-sheet military map provides a detailed overview of the region. Compiled by French staff officers during the 1883-84 campaigns and engraved at the Dépôt de la Guerre, the chart embraces the entire Red-River lowland from Tuyên Quang and Thái-Nguyên in the northwest to the Gulf of Tonkin in the southeast, locating more than a thousand villages, pagodas, markets, and military posts. Contour hachures and spot heights render the limestone massifs that hem the delta.
At the lower left, an inset map titled Réseau Télégraphique, diagrams the newly erected optical and electric lines radiating from Hà Nội toward Bắc Ninh, Hải Dương, and the coastal arsenal of Quảng Yên, showing France’s push to knit its forward garrisons together by wire.
Issued at the height of the Sino-French War (August 1884 – April 1885), this map was a strategic tool for General de Courcy’s expeditionary corps as it secured the Red-River corridor after the Treaty of Huế had proclaimed a French protectorate over Tonkin. Accurate hydrography was essential: the delta’s labyrinth of canals and rice-paddy dykes served both as highways for gunboats and as lines of defence for Black Flag partisans and Qing auxiliaries. Equally critical was the telegraph network—begun only in 1884—which enabled Paris and Saigon to direct operations in real time and would soon underpin colonial administration from Hà Nội, the future capital of French Indochina (est. 1887).
Rarity
OCLC lists three examples, at the BNF, Parisian Museum of Natural History, and University of Chicago.
