On 24 and 25 February 1861 the French attacked and captured the Ky Hoa lines.Īdmiral Léonard Charner, the French commander at the battle of Ky Hoa All these men were under the command of Nguyen Tri Phuong, the most celebrated general in the Vietnamese army. There were also 15,000 men manning the forts along the upper course of the Donnai. After the victory, we discovered from the muster rolls that there were 22,000 regular troops and 10,000 militiamen. The number of enemy soldiers both in and around the fortified camp had grown steadily during the previous year. Bamboo was employed in the defences with consummate art, and the walls were crowned with thorn bushes along their entire length. Subsidiary defences were piled up in front of its walls: wolf-pits, ditches filled with water, palisades and chevaux de frise. The camp was armed with more than 150 cannon of all calibres. This was a rectangle measuring around 3,000 metres by 900 metres, divided into five compartments separated by traverses and enclosed within walls three and a half metres high and two metres thick. The first objective was the capture of the entrenched camp of Ky Hoa. Ky Hoa itself had been transformed into a formidable entrenched camp:
The Vietnamese siege lines, 12 kilometres long, were centred on the village of Ky Hoa (Vietnamese: Kỳ Hòa), and were known to the French as the 'Ky Hoa lines'.
The French and their Spanish allies were besieged in Saigon by a Vietnamese army around 32,000 strong under the command of Nguyễn Tri Phương. The squadron was accompanied by half a dozen armed lorchas purchased in Macao. Charner's squadron, the most powerful French naval force seen in Vietnamese waters before the creation of the French Far East Squadron on the eve of the Sino-French War (August 1884–April 1885), included the steam frigates Impératrice Eugénie and Renommée (Charner and Page's respective flagships), the corvettes Primauguet, Laplace and Du Chayla, eleven screw-driven despatch vessels, five first-class gunboats, seventeen transports and a hospital ship. The end of the Second Opium War in 1860 allowed the French government to despatch reinforcements of 70 ships under Admiral Léonard Charner and 3,500 soldiers under Élie de Vassoigne to Saigon. The arrival of massive reinforcements from the French expeditionary corps in China in 1860 allowed the French to break the Siege of Saigon and regain the initiative. After early French victories at Tourane and Saigon, the Cochinchina campaign reached a point of equilibrium with the French and their Spanish allies besieged in Saigon, which had been captured by a Franco-Spanish expedition under the command of Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly on 17 February 1859.
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