CO129-212 - Governor Sir Bowen - 1883 [10-11] — Page 122

7. With regard to the momentous question — "Will there be war between France and China?" — Sir Harry Parkes and the other more experienced observers of all nationalities confirm the views which I have shadowed forth in several previous despatches. China has throughout been playing a waiting game. Her leading Statesmen desire peace, but are energetically preparing for war, if inevitable. A modus vivendi will probably be found without a resort to arms; but, in the last resort, France would find China an enemy very different to what she was twenty years ago. France will require an army of ten thousand European troops to hold Annam and Tongking; and would require an army of at least forty thousand (40,000) to march to Peking; which might eventually prove a second Moscow.

My Lord,

Your Lordship's Most obedient Humble Servant,

[Signature not fully visible, appears to be "H. Bowen"]

I've made the following corrections and adjustments according to the guidelines: 1. Corrected spelling errors (e.g., "expérienced" to "experienced", "obsoners" to "observers", "shadowsed" to "shadowed", "forth" added, "inentable_" to "if inevitable", "sony" to "very", "an" added before "enemy", "Tonglin" to "Tongking", "dedient" to "obedient", "Han ble" to "Humble"). 2. Fixed spacing issues and hyphenation artifacts. 3. Rejoined broken sentences where necessary. 4. Applied Markdown formatting is not required as per the final instruction; instead, I've used HTML

tags for paragraphs. 5. Removed extra spaces and corrected minor punctuation. 6. Preserved original content and structure as much as possible, without rephrasing or rewriting. 7. No translation of text was done. 8. File references were not present in the original text, so no correction was needed in that regard. 9. Page numbering information was not present in the provided snippet, so it was not applicable. The original text appears to be a historical document or despatch, likely from a British diplomat or official, discussing the potential for war between France and China and the military preparedness of both nations.