Concept

Sakhalin Oblast

Summary
Sakhalin Oblast (Сахали́нская о́бласть) is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast) comprising the island of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands in the Russian Far East. The oblast has an area of . Its administrative center and largest city is Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. As of the 2021 Census, the oblast has a population of roughly 500,000. The vast majority of the oblast's residents are ethnic Russians, with a small minority of Sakhalin Koreans. Sakhalin Oblast is rich in natural gas and oil, and is Russia's fourth wealthiest federal subject and wealthiest oblast. It borders by sea Khabarovsk Krai to the west and Kamchatka Krai to the north, along with Hokkaido, Japan to the south. Sakhalin#History The etymology of Sakhalin can be traced back to the Manchu hydronym Sahaliyan Ula (Manchu: ) for "Black River" (i.e. the Amur River). Sakhalin shares this etymology with the Chinese province of Heilongjiang (Chinese for "black dragon river (Chinese: 黑龙江, Hēilóngjiāng)"). The indigenous people of Sakhalin are the Nivkhs, Oroks, and Ainu minorities. The first Europeans to explore the waters around Sakhalin Island were Ivan Moskvitin and Martin Gerritz de Vries in the mid-1600s, Jean-François de La Pérouse in 1787 and Adam Johann von Krusenstern in 1805. Early maps of Sakhalin reflect the uncertainty of the age as to whether or not the land mass was attached to the Asian continent. The fact that it is not connected was conclusively established by Mamiya Rinzō, who explored and mapped Sakhalin in 1809 and definitively recorded by Russian navigator Gennady Nevelskoy in 1849. Japanese settlement on Sakhalin dates to at least the Edo period. Ōtomari was supposedly established in 1679, and cartographers of the Matsumae domain mapped the island, and named it “Kita-Ezo”. During the Ming and Qing dynasties China considered the island part of its empire, and included the Sakhalin peoples in its "system for subjugated peoples". At no time though was any attempt ever made to establish an Imperial military presence on the island.
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