In the list of European colonial powers, Belgium can be described as an unknown one. In terms of land size, Belgium is not only small in size, but also became independent in 1830, starting even later in the colonial process. However, such a country, which from any point of view, could not become a colonial power, occupied a place in the gap between the traditional powers such as Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, and Belgium's colonial territory in Africa was more than two million square kilometers.
Belgium covers an area of about 30,500 square kilometers, about 37% of Chongqing Municipality, located in the lowland area at the mouth of the Rhine River, and is called the "three lowland countries" together with the Netherlands and Luxembourg. During the Roman Empire, the lowlands were divided into north and south, roughly equivalent to the prototypes of today's Belgium and the Netherlands, but what really made the two drift apart was the influence of the surrounding powers. Belgium is heavily influenced by France in the south, where French and Catholicism are the dominant, while the Netherlands is more heavily influenced by Germany, so the inhabitants are mainly Protestant and Dutch, which is also a Germanic language. After Napoleon's defeat in 1814, the Anti-French League annexed Belgium to the Netherlands in order to weaken France, but differences made it difficult for the two to live together.
The strong promotion of Protestant and Dutch in the North completely angered the Catholic and French-speaking Belgians in the south, and after more than 20 years of efforts, the Netherlands finally recognized Belgian independence in 1839, when the world colonies had long been divided by the British and French powers. Fortunately, Belgium has caught up with the express train of the two industrial revolutions, and with the rapid development of the commodity economy, Belgium urgently needs to open up overseas markets, but looking around the world, where can we find a decent colony? Compared with the old colonial empire, Belgium's strength is too inferior, hard and hard is certainly not enough, if you want to get a piece of the pie overseas, you can only survive in the cracks between the big powers.
Eventually, Belgium took a fancy to Africa, so King Leopold II of Belgium hired American explorers to go deep into the Congo River Valley in the name of "scientific expeditions" to establish a stronghold. In the same way that Britain, France, Portugal, and others did in Africa, the Belgians concluded that the Congo River Valley, though tribal, was sparsely populated, provoking tribal tensions and then breaking them down became the most effective and costly option. Soon Belgium established colonies in the Congo River Valley, and the Great Powers such as Britain, France, and Germany immediately noticed the belgian movements, and although the old colonial countries did not welcome Belgium's intervention, they were not monolithic themselves.
The conflict of interest between Britain and France in the African colonies was already an open matter, and at this time Germany gradually abandoned the conservative policies of the Bismarck era, and Kaiser Wilhelm II began to actively expand overseas.
As a result, anglo-French-German views on the colonization of Africa were not unified. In 1884, european countries met in Berlin on how to divide the colonies of the Congo River Valley, and serious differences of opinion eventually benefited the Belgian fishermen, and finally everyone acquiesced to the Belgian occupation of most of the Congo River Valley. The year after the conference ended, the King of Belgium personally announced the establishment of the Congo colony and named it the Congo Free State.
The congo river water volume reached 41,200 cubic meters per second, only less than the Amazon River, ranking second in the world, larger than China's Yangtze River, Yellow River, HuaiHe combined.
At this time, the Congo did not belong to the Belgian state on the legal level, it belonged to the personal property of the Belgian king. The royal family's rule here is extremely brutal, and in just two decades, the Congolese population has plummeted by 10 million, and world public opinion has been in an uproar. To ease the escalating tensions, Belgium took over Congo from the crown in 1908, but the armed resistance in the Congo Free State remained unresolved. In 1960, Belgium withdrew from Africa and the Congo Free State became an independent state, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
With an area of about 2,344,900 square kilometers, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the second largest country in Africa, after Algeria. The Dr. Congo has a population of about 81.34 million (2017), about twice as large as Algeria, and if you only look at the area and population, the DRC is a superpower in Africa.