Siege of Tourane
1858 siege at the start of the French conquest of Vietnam
The siege of Tourane (September 1858–March 1860) was a Vietnamese victory during the Cochinchina campaign, a punitive campaign against the Vietnamese launched by France and Spain in 1858. A joint Franco-Spanish expedition under the command of Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly captured Tourane (modern Da Nang) in September 1858, but was then besieged in the city by the Vietnamese and forced eventually to evacuate it in March 1860.
Background
In 1857, the Vietnamese emperor Tự Đức executed two Spanish Catholic missionaries. This was neither the first nor the last such incident. On this occasion, France and Britain had just dispatched a joint military expedition to the Qing Empire as part of the Second Opium War, and the French had troops to hand with which to intervene in Vietnam. In November 1857, the French emperor Napoleon III authorized Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly to launch a punitive expedition. In the following September, a joint French and Spanish expedition landed at Tourane, whose fine, sheltered harbor would make it a good base of operations for a campaign against Annam.
Forces engaged
Rigault de Genouilly's flagship was the screw-powered 50-gun frigate Némésis. He was accompanied by the screw-powered 12-gun corvettes Primauguet and Phlégéton, the steam-gunboats Alarme, Avalanche, Dragonne, Fusée and Mitraille, and the steam transports Durance, Saône, Gironde, Dordogne and Meurthe. The Spanish navy was represented by the armed despatch vessel El Caño.
“Siege of Tourane” enters the record as 1858 siege at the start of the French conquest of Vietnam. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Siege, Tourane and siege can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5361929. Authority coordinates are 16.067, 108.233. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1858, 1860 and 1857.
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