The French in Indochina 1883-85

Colonial campaigns in the 19th century are very up the list of my favorite campaigns.
There is a lot written about all the British wars in the 19th century and as a German I have access to all the German books about our campaigns.

With other languages I have my problems to read and you can't find much about other nations colonial wars in English.

One of the very interesting subjects in my eyes are the French campaigns in the second half of the 19th century. There is material of campaigns in North Africa available, mostly involving the Foreign legion.  Lesser on the campaigns again Samori.

What I searched for a long time are books on the French conquest of Tonkin (part of Vietnam today) and the Sino-French war.

Wikipedia has a lot of articles about this campaign. Some years ago I printed over 200 pages of detailed accounts of all the battles there. Now I found this link which describes the campaign on a few pages.

In the past I painted French colonials simply from British Zulu-war infantry. You see the uniform is nearly similar

With a head-conversion you have Zouaves and Turkos in Indochina

And there are the local units - Tirallieurs Anamites, Conchinoise etc. etc.

There enemies are much more difficult. First the Anamites

After they were fought down by the French the war continued as the Sino-French war. The enemies for the French were now the Chinese Black Flags

Ok, enough uniformplates for now. As some years ago I asked Ingo to make me some Anamites after finishing some other projects I asked him to sculpt for me the Tirallieurs Anamites and some blackflags too.  Here the result

The Chinese (could be used as regulars for the Sino-Japanese and up to the Boxer-Rebellion too.

And the Tirallieurs

Andy told me nobody would be interested in my obscure ideas. Make him wrong and take a look at these guys in our shop :-)