During the Sino-French War (1884-1885) and the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), regular and irregular Vietnamese and Korean forces took up arms both alongside and against French, Japanese, and Chinese troops. Rather than treating this multitude of armed (and unarmed) participants in Nguy?n Vietnam and Choson Korea as purely passive observers (invisible) or hijacked partisans (incompetent or corrupt), this study empirically demonstrates how the monarchy, government officials, local administrators, scholars, religious networks, merchants, mercenaries, peasants, rebels, paramilitary groups, and righteous armies (nghia quân in Vietnamese; uibyong in Korean) forged strategies and armed alliances. By centring Vietnam and Korea in the analysis, it moves away from victimhood narratives, where Vietnamese and Koreans are portrayed as objects of imperial action—first by China, then by France and Japan respectively. It also avoids the trap of treating European-style colonialism in East Asia (and elsewhere) as inevitable, viewing it as more than just a changing of guards over already-subjugated polities.