Lucien Florent Paul Coffyn (Paul Coffyn; May 20, 1810 - August 5, 1871) was a French military engineer, urban planner, and cartographer active in France's overseas possessions: Algeria, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Nouvelle-Calédonie, China, Saigon, etc. Coffyn was born in Dunkirk, the son of François Joseph Coffyn, a prominent merchant and the U.S. Consul for Pas-de-Calais. He studied military engineering, joining the Marines Corps du Génie. His first service was in Montpellier, followed by Valenciennes and Algeria. He was sent to the Pacific in 1849 to become Chief Engineer of Tahiti and the Marquesas, where he laid out the colonial capital Papeete (Plan terrier du Domaine de l'Etat. Croquis Annexe au Memoire Annuel, 1849; National Library of New Zealand). For this and other work, he was given the Légion d'Honneur in 1856. Afterward, he was sent briefly to Nouvelle-Calédonie. When the Second Italian War of Independence (1589) broke out, he was briefly reassigned to Italy. In 1861, in the wake of the Second Opium War (1856 - 1860), Coffyn was commissioned as the Chief of the French Engineers in China. Later that year, he was made the 'Colonel Commandant le Génie en Cochinchine'. Following his success in this post, he retired, somewhat, taking a position as Director of Engineers at Brest.
