Paracel Islands 🏳

The Wujing Zongyao, published in the Northern Song dynasty, recorded that the South China Sea islands lay within the patrol zones of the imperial navy. Chinese claims to the Paracels rest in part on this early administrative reference.

The astronomer and official Guo Shoujing was despatched to the South China Sea to measure the islands and adjacent waters. The mission is cited as evidence of early Chinese state activity in the archipelago.

Under Emperor Lê Thánh Tông of the Lê dynasty, Vietnamese seafarers harvested sea products and salvaged shipwrecks in and around the Paracels. The name Hoàng Sa appears in Vietnamese documents from 1483 and in the An Nam quốc họa đồ of 1490.

Captain Huijch Jansen and twelve sailors reached Đàng Trong, territory of Lord Nguyễn Phúc Nguyên, to seek rescue for castaways left on the islands. The episode is used to show Nguyễn authority over the waters around the archipelago.

Engagements between Dutch vessels and the Nguyễn navy took place in the waters concerned. They mark contested European and local control of the sea lanes around the Paracels.

Đỗ Bá Công Đạo compiled four series of route maps from Thăng Long to other Southeast Asian countries, partly from the earlier Hồng Đức Atlas. One volume describes a long sandbank in mid-sea called Bãi Cát Vàng, identified with Hoàng Sa.

The frigate sighted the north-eastern islands while carrying a Jesuit mission to Canton. The group has borne its name ever since, an early European fixing of the archipelago's geography.

Salvage and exploitation of the Paracel and Spratly islands were placed on an official footing under the Nguyễn lords. The Phủ Biên Tạp Lục of 1776 records this exploitation from 1702 onwards.

The six-volume Miscellaneous Records on the Pacification of the Frontiers detailed Nguyễn territories, including exploitation of the Paracel and Spratly Islands from 1702. It became a core documentary support for Vietnamese claims.

On his accession Gia Long established a Company of the Paracels to oversee activity in the archipelago, which contemporary description counted among his kingdom's possessions. It institutionalised Vietnamese administration of the islands.

Ross surveyed the south coast of China in 1807, the Paracels in 1808, part of the Cochin China coast in 1809 and Palawan in 1810. His charts, published in 1821, gave the first reliable European mapping of the reefs.

A Hoàng Sa naval task unit was sent to report on maritime routes and produce charts of the archipelago. The mission extended Vietnamese hydrographic knowledge and administrative presence.

According to Jean-Baptiste Chaigneau, later the first French Consul to the kingdom, Gia Long formally claimed the Paracels, then understood to include the present-day Spratlys. One commentator sees Vietnamese interest crystallised by this flag-planting.

The Ministry of Construction was instructed to erect a temple and markers and plant trees for navigational purposes. The works asserted a permanent Vietnamese physical presence in the archipelago.

A naval task unit commander with 21 men sailed to the islands to survey them and produce a map. It was one of a sequence of annual state missions to the Paracels.

A royal ordinance ordered troops to the islands, while Phạm Văn Nguyên's naval unit, with workers from Bình Định and Quãng Ngãi, built the Hoàng Sa temple and erected steles on Bàn Than Rock in the present-day Woody Island. The ordinance was preserved by the Đặng family and publicly disclosed in early 2009.

Following a ministry report stressing the islands' great strategic importance to maritime borders, Emperor Minh Mạng ordered royal navy commander Phạm Hữu Nhật to erect markers. Ten five-metre steles with claiming inscriptions were set up.

The Unified Đại Nam Complete Map distinctly separated the Golden Sandbank from the Ten-thousand-league Long Sandbank. It was the first Vietnamese map to distinguish the Paracels from the Spratlys.

The assault on present-day Đà Nẵng opened the French conquest of Vietnam. It began the process by which colonial France inherited Vietnamese maritime claims.

The ship Freya and warship Iltis mapped the islands over successive seasons without seeking Chinese or French consent, and neither government protested; an observation post was found on Lincoln Island by German officers in 1883. The German Admiralty published the results as Die Paracel-Inseln in 1885.

The accords, together with the Treaty of Huế, ended the undeclared war and required China to give up claims of suzerainty over Vietnam. France gained Annam and Tonkin as protectorates, establishing full colonial rule.

French Indochina united Tonkin, Annam, Cochin China and Cambodia under one administration. The boundary convention with China of the same year is read by Beijing as placing the islands in Chinese territory.

Statements made by Britain in 1900 and by France in 1921 treated the Xisha Islands as belonging to the Administrative Prefecture of Hainan Island. China cites them as third-party recognition of its sovereignty.

The islands are claimed by Taiwan and Vietnam as well as China. They are surrounded by productive fishing grounds and by potential oil and gas reserves, which sharpen the dispute.

Reacting to Japanese interest in guano, over 170 sailors in the warships Fubo, Guangjin and Shenhang inspected 15 islands in June, erected named stone tablets, raised the flag and fired cannon to declare the islands sacred Chinese territory. France did not protest.

Merchants were asked to take on the development affairs of the South China Sea islands, with officials ordered to provide protection and maintenance. The scheme was framed as highlighting Chinese territory and safeguarding its interests.

The French Ministry of Colonies and Ministry of Foreign Affairs agreed the islands were Chinese and that no claim should be pressed for France or Annam. Accordingly France did not protest the 1921 Guangdong declaration and in 1926 refused a French company's application to exploit Paracel guano.

After the fall of the Qing dynasty the new provincial government assigned the islands to Hainan Prefecture. The Southern Military Government reaffirmed the decision in 1921, and France did not protest.

An investigation team organised with Sun Yat-Sen University surveyed the islets and produced a detailed Report of Surveys on the Paracel Islands. It was the most systematic Chinese scientific documentation of the archipelago to that date.

In 1932 France, abandoning its earlier acceptance of Chinese sovereignty, asserted a formal claim to the Paracel Islands on behalf of the Annam protectorate, based on seventeenth-century activity it had previously judged weak, and French Indochina annexed the islands, setting up a weather station on Pattle Island whose maintenance was continued by its successor state, Vietnam. The Chinese Foreign Ministry instructed its envoy in Paris on 27 July 1932 to lodge a formal protest denying the claim.

Building work expanded infrastructure with potential military and civilian uses. It continued the steady physical consolidation of Chinese control across the archipelago.

The device was reported as trialling renewable generation for the archipelago's main settlement. Woody Island already had an airport with a 2,400-metre runway, three main roads and a causeway to Rocky Island.

The 600-hectare scheme in Khánh Hòa province was to have 9,600 MW capacity with dock and terminal facilities to supply gas and distribute LNG in South-East Asia. It was presumed to draw on offshore deposits in waters around the Chinese-held Paracels.

The arbitration backed the Philippines against Chinese claims to resources and maritime areas exceeding entitlements under the Convention. The award undercut the legal basis of the expansive Chinese claim covering the Paracels.

Photographs indicated reclamation and expansion at Duncan Island, North Island and Tree Island. By February 2017 the AMTI project at CSIS reported reclamation on 20 reefs, creating 20 Chinese outposts with small harbours.

Plans reported in 2012 came to fruition with the plant's activation, easing the freshwater constraint on permanent settlement. It formed part of a wider infrastructure programme supporting Chinese territorial claims.

Chinese state media reported clashes as Hanoi sought to prevent a Chinese oil rig setting up in the area. The standoff was the most serious maritime confrontation between the two states since 1974.

A representative handed the note to the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi over plans to bring tourists to the Paracels. It was part of a sustained Vietnamese protest campaign against Chinese consolidation.

The legislation demarcated Vietnam's sea boundaries to encompass both the Paracel and Spratly Islands. It hardened Hanoi's legal claim in direct response to Chinese administrative moves.

The new city in Hainan Province was given administrative responsibility for the Paracels and wider South China Sea features. It gave Chinese control a civil governmental structure alongside its military presence.

The Vice-Mayor and officials announced development on Duncan and Drummond Islands, but according to The China Post a PRC government official denied the plans the same month given the sensitivities involved. The episode showed tension between development and diplomacy.

The find lay some 200 nautical miles out, in waters around the Chinese-controlled Paracels. It was later identified as the presumed supply for a proposed Vietnamese LNG development.

A foreign ministry statement under President Lee Teng-hui claimed the whole sea and its islands as Taiwanese territory, legally, historically and geographically. Taipei has since restated the position, notably on 9 May 2014 when it rejected both Vietnamese and mainland Chinese claims.

Visitors could thereafter reach the archipelago, with Chinese tourists later taking a 20-hour ferry and paying up to US$2,000 for a five-day cruise subject to approved applications. Tourism became a means of consolidating effective control.

The district was created within Quang Nam-Da Nang province, giving the Vietnamese claim an administrative form. It remains Hanoi's formal governmental structure for the archipelago.

Hanoi tried to persuade Beijing to acknowledge Vietnamese sovereignty over the Spratlys in return for conceding the Paracels. The bargain was not struck, and Vietnam has maintained both claims since.

In January 1974 the People's Republic of China defeated South Vietnamese forces in the Battle of the Paracel Islands, expelling them from the Crescent Group and taking the western islands, leaving it in control of the entire archipelago. Chinese control has been unbroken since, and China subsequently built a military installation on Woody Island with an airfield and artificial harbour; the battle was dramatised in the 1976 film Storm in the South China Sea.

The declaration applied to all Chinese territory, expressly including the Paracel and Spratly Islands. North Vietnam's prime minister Phạm Văn Đồng recognised Chinese sovereignty over the Paracels the same year, a statement Hanoi later retracted, saying in June 1977 that it had been made to secure Chinese aid against the Americans.

By 1955 South Vietnam held the Crescent Group and in 1956 replaced French control of the islands; by February 1956 Ngô Đình Diệm had stationed the South Vietnamese Navy on Pattle Island. Both the PRC and the ROC condemned the move and reaffirmed their own claims.

Japan formally gave up the islands it had occupied during the Second World War. The same Geneva Agreements, signed by the PRC among others, partitioned Vietnam into North and South, leaving Saigon to inherit the southern claim.

Taipei negotiated a separate settlement with Tokyo dealing with the island territories. It supplemented the multilateral San Francisco arrangements from which it had been excluded.

The USSR moved that the Paracels and Spratlys be given to China, but the motion failed by 46 votes to 3. Vietnam's representative claimed both archipelagos as Vietnamese territory without challenge from other nations present.

After the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and the fall of the Nationalist regime on the mainland, the PRC took the eastern half of the archipelago including its largest island. This established the divided control that persisted until 1974.

The request implicitly recognised French authority over the feature at that moment. It illustrates the fluidity of recognised control before the Communist victory in China.

The U-shaped line encompassed the entire sea, including the Spratly and Paracel Islands, as Chinese territory. It became the ancestor of the later nine-dash line at the heart of modern disputes.

In October and November 1946 the Republic of China occupied the South China Sea islands, garrisoning Woody Island and posting flags and markers. France attempted but failed to make the Chinese garrison leave.

The Allies assigned the Republic of China to accept Japanese surrenders in the area, transferring the Paracels and Spratlys to Chinese control. It set the basis for the Nationalist occupation that followed.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War Japan seized the Paracels on the pretext that they were Chinese territory, garrisoned them and built a submarine base at Itu Aba. Administration was placed under Taiwan or Hainan, and in 1941 the islands were formally made part of Japanese-ruled Taiwan.

Despite repeated Chinese protests, colonial troops landed and took physical possession of the islands. The occupation lasted only until Japanese seizure the following year.

French forces occupied the archipelagos, announced annexation and formally incorporated them into French Indochina, occupying the Spratlys on 6 April; weather stations were built but the numerous Chinese fishermen found there were left undisturbed. It was the first formal European incorporation of the islands into a colonial state.