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Tonkin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tonkin (Đông Kinh in Vietnamese), also spelled Tongkin or Tongking, is the northernmost part of Vietnam, south of China's Yunnan and Guangxi Provinces, east of northern Laos, and west of the Gulf of Tonkin. Locally, it is known as Bắc Kỳ, meaning "Northern Region". Located on the fertile delta of the Red River, Tonkin is rich in rice production.
The term derives from Đông Kinh (東京), a former name of Hanoi, which was the capital of Vietnam since the 7th century. (The name means "eastern capital", and is identical in meaning and written form in Chinese characters to that of Tokyo.)
Starting around 100 BC the land was given the Chinese name Jiaozhi (交趾; pinyin: Jiāozhǐ; Vietnamese: Giao Chỉ). Around 650 AD it was renamed Annam by the government of the Tang Dynasty. Later, it was called Đại Cồ Việt by the Đinh Dynasty and then Đại Việt by the Lý Dynasty.
France assumed sovereignty over all of Vietnam after the Sino-French War (1884-1885). The French colonial government then divided Vietnam into three different administrative territories. They named the territories: Tonkin (in the north), Annam (in the center), and Cochinchina (in the south). These territories were fairly arbitrary in their geographic extent. The vast majority of the Vietnamese regarded their country as a single land and fought for much of the next 90 years to achieve unification.
