In 1887, the Portuguese government and the Qing government signed the "Draft Treaty of the Sino-Portuguese Conference" and the "Sino-Portuguese Peace and Commerce Treaty", and Macao, China, became a Portuguese colony; in 1898, the British forced the Qing government to sign the "Sino-British Exhibition and Expansion of Hong Kong Boundary Sites", and Hong Kong was "leased" to Britain for 99 years. This period of history has become a pain for all Chinese, and in the blink of an eye, 99 years have passed, and Hong Kong, Macao and other places have returned to the embrace of the motherland.
Today, I would like to tell you about another place on the mainland that was also "leased" by the great powers for 99 years, which is 400 times larger than Macao, but its name is little known, when it was called Guangzhou Bay.
"Guangzhou Bay" has a long history, dating back to the middle and late Neolithic period 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, which has been inhabited by humans, and when Qin Shi Huang unified the country in 221 BC, the land was under the administration of Xiang County, until the Qing Dynasty, it was inhabited by generations of Chinese.
In 1897, the French warship Bayard swung into Guangzhou Bay, thinking that this was a good place, and that the Western capitalist countries were dividing up China, so France also casually found an excuse to "suck coal" and asked the Qing government to "lease" Guangzhou Bay to them.
When the local residents heard it, they were very angry, and when the Qing government heard it, they also angrily refused. But the French have long found out the bottom of the Qing government, and they will directly fight without borrowing, but the people of Guangzhou Bay are not afraid, and they take up the weapons at hand and "start drying" with the French, some of them are holding wooden sticks, some are holding large knives, in this case, they still repelled the French army with sophisticated weapons many times!
This fight, that is, 1 year, Guangzhou Bay was still hit hard. Later, Guo Moruo sighed: "A thousand cannons and a thousand blood, an inch of rivers and mountains and an inch of gold!" "In honor of the indomitable people of Guangzhou Wanning."
In 1899, when the Qing government saw that Guangzhou Bay was no longer working, it immediately compromised with France and signed an unequal treaty again, the Sino-French Mutual Agreement on the Guangzhou Bay Concession, which designated suixi and Wuchuan counties as part of the land and islands and the Maxia Bay between the two counties as the French concession, collectively known as "Guangzhou Bay".
Immediately after the outbreak of the War of Resistance, the coastal ports of the mainland fell one after another, but Guangzhou Bay was relatively remote, so it escaped many disasters, but how could the Japanese army miss a place? In February 1943, the Japanese army came to Guangzhou Bay and established the Japanese puppet regime here. France was defeated, so on February 21, it signed the Agreement with Japan on the Joint Defense of Canton Bay, "transferring" Canton Bay to Japan.
In 1945, japan surrendered, france was beaten to the point of exhaustion, they "took the initiative to return" the mainland's Guangzhou Bay, 46 years after guangzhou bay was forcibly occupied by other countries, that is, Guangzhou Bay returned to the embrace of the motherland 53 years in advance.
After the return of the leased land of Guangzhou Bay to the motherland, the Guangdong Provincial Government immediately changed it into a provincial-administered city, named "Zhanjiang City", with a total area of 13225.44 square kilometers, which is 400 times the land area of Macao, and its economic strength has also been greatly improved, and the people's lives are very rich.
Nowadays, the development of Zhanjiang Is getting better and better, and has won the honorary titles of "China's Excellent Tourism City", "National Double Support Model City", "National Sanitary City" and so on, I believe that in the future days, the development of Zhanjiang City will be even higher!