in China's southern provinces, promising to open five ports in the following years. Although no indemnity was paid, China accrued 20 million taels in debt for the war effort, and lost another 100 million taels in economic losses. As a result, Elleman deemed China to have lost the war by any modern standard. Jane E. Elliott suggests that contemporary Chinese and foreign analysts may have been correct in finding the final peace treaty amusing as the Chinese seemed to be ascendant. Elliott notes that Western scholarly sources fail to give straightforward reasons and detailed descriptions of Chinese victories. Chinese victories were attributed to French mismanagement or misjudgement, the climate, and the difficulties of logistics. However the same problems also existed for the Chinese. Francis Garnier, Henri Rivière, and many senior French officers died in the war. In many instances, the French were only able to hold on to forts in Vietnam and Taiwan for a limited time before retreating. The French succeeded in capturing Keelung in Taiwan but failed to take Tamsui. These limited successes and failures may have appeared to indicate both French victory in France and French defeat in China. Elliott notes that contemporary European sources were adverse to reporting French losses and glossed over mistakes made on the French side. Accounts of battles were manipulated to consistently portray the French as superior and never definitively losing, so that the Chinese never won except in instances of French error. Even recent work "perpetuates the myth that the French defeated the Chinese easily." The land campaign of the Sino-French War has been described as a French defeat and a Chinese victory. Navy As far as China was concerned, the war hastened the emergence of a strong nationalist movement, and was a significant step in the decline of the Qing empire. The loss of the Fujian fleet on 23 August 1884 was considered particularly humiliating. The Chinese strategy also demonstrated the flaws in the late Qing national defence system of independent regional armies and fleets. The military and naval commanders in the south received no assistance from Li Hongzhang's Northern Seas (Beiyang) fleet, based in the Gulf of Zhili, and only token assistance from the Southern Seas (Nanyang) fleet at Shanghai. The excuse given, that these forces were needed to deter a Japanese penetration of Korea, was not convincing. The truth was, that having built up a respectable steam navy