off the Pagoda anchorage and the Foochow Navy Yard. Others drifted downriver and either ran aground or sank between Losing Island and the Min'an pass. French officers aboard Châteaurenault, anchored near the entrance to the Min River, saw three Chinese warships drifting downriver on the evening of 23 August, abandoned by their crews and blazing from stem to stern. One of the Chinese ships exploded in front of their eyes. Courbet estimated Chinese casualties at between 2,000 and 3,000 dead. The commemorative tablets in a shrine erected shortly after the war at the Pagoda Anchorage to honour the Chinese dead list the names of 831 sailors and soldiers killed on 23 August, but this list does not include the hundreds of Chinese soldiers killed by the French during their descent of the Min River. The Chinese imperial commissioner Zhang Peilun, who made no serious attempt to coordinate the resistance of the Fujian fleet, was degraded after the battle and replaced by the veteran general Zuo Zongtang (). He Jing (), the governor-general of Fujian and Zhejiang, Zhang Zhaotong (), the governor of Fujian, and He Ruzhang (), the director-general of the Foochow Navy Yard, were also degraded. The Manchu General of Fuzhou Mutušan (), who had directed the defence of the Jinpai pass on 27 and 28 August with skill and energy, kept his job. The Cantonese naval officer Zhang Cheng (), a graduate of the Foochow naval college and captain of the Chinese flagship Yangwu, abandoned ship as soon as the battle started and was later beheaded for cowardice. Factors in the French victory One of the factors in the French victory at Fuzhou was that the French squadron had sailed up the Min River in time of peace. The Chinese claimed after the battle, with some justification, that the French would never have been able to ascend the river if the two countries had been at war. A second important factor was the absence from the battle of the modern battleships Dingyuan and Zhenyuan, which had recently been completed in Germany for China's Beiyang Fleet (Northern Seas fleet). The Chinese battleships were more powerful than any of the ships under Courbet's command, and in December 1883, foreseeing that war with China was imminent, the French persuaded the German government to detain them in the event of hostilities. The German government invented a number of plausible excuses for keeping