Courbet followed up this success on 1 March by locating "Kaiji", "Nanchen" and "Nanrui", which had taken refuge with four other Chinese warships in Zhenhai Bay, near the port of Ningbo. Courbet considered forcing the Chinese defences, but finally decided to guard the entrance to the bay to keep the enemy vessels bottled up there for the duration of hostilities. A brief and inconclusive skirmish between the French cruiser "Nielly" and the Chinese shore batteries on 1March enabled the Chinese general Ouyang Lijian, charged with the defence of Ningbo, to claim the so-called Battle of Zhenhai as a defensive victory. In February 1885, under diplomatic pressure from China, Britain invoked the provisions of the 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act and closed Hong Kong and other ports in the Far East to French warships. The French government retaliated by ordering Courbet to implement a 'rice blockade' of the Yangzi River, hoping to bring the Qing court to terms by provoking serious rice shortages in northern China. The rice blockade severely disrupted the transport of rice by sea from Shanghai and forced the Chinese to carry it overland, but the war ended before the blockade seriously affected China's economy. A major French victory at Keelung in early March 1885 enabled Courbet to detach a marine infantry battalion and a marine artillery section from the Keelung garrison to capture the Pescadores Islands in late March. Courbet directed operations in person, and this brief colonial campaign was fought in the traditional style, by ships of the French navy and by the "troupes de marine". Strategically, the Pescadores Campaign was an important victory, which would have prevented the Chinese from further reinforcing their army in Formosa, but it came too late to affect the outcome of the war. A proposal to use the Far East squadron to make a landing in the Gulf of Petchili was cancelled on the news of the French defeat in the Battle of Bang Bo (24March 1885) and the subsequent retreat from Lạng Sơn, and Courbet was on the point of evacuating Keelung to reinforce the Tonkin expeditionary corps, leaving only a minimum garrison at Makung in the Pescadores, when hostilities came to an end in April 1885. The French occupied the Pescadores until July 1885. Courbet and several dozen other French soldiers and sailors died of cholera during the brief French occupation.