Kwangchow Wan
| Kwangchow Wan | ||||||||||
| Kouang-Tchéou-Wan | ||||||||||
| Constituent territory of French Indochina Leased territory of France |
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 Location of Kwangchow Wan in French Indochina
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| Capital | Fort-Bayard | |||||||||
| Languages | ||||||||||
| Political structure | Leased Territory | |||||||||
| Governor-General | List of Governors-General | |||||||||
| Historical era | New Imperialism | |||||||||
| • | Treaty of Kouang-Tchéou-Wan | 10 April 1898 | ||||||||
| • | Franco-Chinese Agreement | 28 February 1946 | ||||||||
| Area | ||||||||||
| • | 1899 | 1,300 km² (502 sq mi) | ||||||||
| Population | ||||||||||
| • | 1911 est. | 189,000 | ||||||||
| • | 1935 est. | 209,000 | ||||||||
| Currency | French Indochinese piastre | |||||||||
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Guangzhouwan (officially Kouang-Tchéou-Wan; also spelled Kwangchow Wan, Kwangchow-wan, Kwang-Chou-Wan or Quang-Tchéou-Wan) (Chinese: 廣州灣; literally: "Guangzhou Bay") was a small enclave on the southern coast of China ceded by Qing China to France as a leased territory and administered as an outlier of French Indochina. The territory did not experience the rapid growth in population that other parts of coastal China experienced, rising from 189,000 in 1911 to just 209,000 in 1935. Industries included shipping and coal mining.
Japan occupied the territory in February 1943. The French briefly took it back in 1945 before returning it to China in 1946, at which point it was given the name Zhanjiang, also known in Cantonese as Tsamkong. The capital of the territory was Fort-Bayard. The old spellings "Tsankiang", "Chankiang" and "Tsamkong" were replaced by the pinyin romanisation "Zhanjiang" by the Chinese government in 1958.
The leased territory was situated in Guangdong Province (Kwangtung Province) on the east side of the Leizhou Peninsula (French: Péninsule de Leitcheou), north of Hainan, around a bay then called Kwangchowan, now called the Port of Zhanjiang. The bay forms the estuary of the Maxie River (Chinese: Maxie He, French: Rivière Ma-The). The Maxie is navigable as far as 19 kilometres (12 mi) inland even by large warships. The territory ceded to France included the islands lying in the bay, which enclosed an area 29 km long by 10 km wide and a minimum water depth of 10 metres. The islands were recognized at the time as an admirable natural defense, the main islands being Donghai Dao. The limits of the concession inland were fixed in November 1899; on the left bank of the Maxie, France gained from Gaozhou prefecture (Kow Chow Fu) a strip of territory 18 km by 10 km, and on the right bank a strip 24 km by 18 km from Leizhou prefecture (Lei Chow Fu). The total land area of the leased territory was 1,300 square kilometres (500 sq mi). The city of Fort-Bayard (Zhanjiang) was developed as a port.
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