French soldiers and sailors succumbed to cholera during the French occupation of the Pescadores. Cholera broke out within one or two days of the landing, and by 23 April 15 men had died and a further 20 had been hospitalised. The disease had probably been brought over from Keelung by the marine infantry of Lange's battalion, but the French suspected that it originated in Makung, whose Chinese population lived in cramped and insanitary conditions. Courbet therefore isolated the French cantonments from contact with any possible contagion from Makung. All Chinese houses within a certain distance were demolished to create a cordon sanitaire around the French barracks, several nearby mosquito-ridden streams were filled in, and each barrack hut was disinfected with iron sulphate and phenic acid. These precautions gradually brought the disease under control, and most of the French troops hospitalised in April recovered in May. However, the precautions came too late for Admiral Courbet himself, who contracted cholera at the beginning of June and died aboard his flagship Bayard in Makung harbour on the night of 11 June 1885. Courbet's body was taken back to France for a state funeral, but the other French dead were buried in two cemeteries at Makung, one for the marine infantry of Lange's battalion and the other for the sailors of the Far East Squadron. Two commemorative obelisks erected in the summer of 1885 in these cemeteries can still be seen. One is in Makung itself, the other on the tip of the southern cape that encloses Makung harbour, formerly known as Dutch Point (from the ruins of an old Dutch fort there). Both bear almost identical inscriptions: A la memoire des soldats [marins] français décedés à Makung ('To the memory of the French soldiers [sailors] who died at Makung'). A third obelisk, erected by Admiral Sébastien Lespès as a monument to Courbet's memory, was removed in 1954, but its marble inscription has been preserved: A la memoire de l'amiral Courbet et des braves morts pour la France aux Pescadores en 1885 ('To the memory of Admiral Courbet and the brave men who died for France in the Pescadores in 1885'). The bodies of two marine infantry officers who died of cholera in early June 1885, sous-commissaire Marie-Joseph-Louis Dert and Lieutenant Louis Jehenne, were originally buried in front of Courbet's monument (Courbet had attended their funerals only days before his own death). In 1954,