Rehe Province

Rehe (simplified Chinese: 热河; traditional Chinese: 熱河; pinyin: Rèhé; literally: "Hot River"; Mongolian: ᠬᠠᠯᠠᠭᠤᠨ ᠭᠣᠣᠯ), also known as Jehol, is a former Chinese Special administrative district and province.

Administration

Rehe was located north of the Great Wall, west of Manchuria, and east of Mongolia. The capital of Rehe was the city of Chengde. The second largest city in the province was Chaoyang, followed by Chifeng. The province covered an area of 114,000 square kilometers.

History

Rehe was once at the core of the Khitan-led Liao Dynasty. Rehe was conquered by the Manchu banners before they took possession of Beijing in 1644. Between 1703 and 1820, the Qing emperors spent almost each summer in their residence of Bishu shanzhuang in Chengde. They governed the empire from Chengde, and received there foreign diplomats and representatives of vassal and tributary countries. The Kangxi emperor restricted the admission to the forests and prairies of Rehe to the court's hunting expeditions and to the maintenance of the imperial cavalary. Agricultural settlements were at first forbidden to Han Chinese. In the early 19th century, by which time Rehe had become part of the province of Zhili, migrants from Hebei and Liaoning settled in Rehe and displaced the Mongol communities.

The Republic of China created the Rehe Special Area (熱河特別區) in 1914, and the Province of Jehol in 1923. To form a buffer zone between China proper and Japanese-controlled Manchukuo, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Jehol in Operation Nekka on January 21, 1933. It was subsequently annexed by the Empire of Manchukuo, as the anto (province) of Rehe. The seizure of Jehol poisoned relations between Japan and China, and was one of the incidents that led to the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Ar the end of World War II, when the Republic of China resumed control of Manchuria, the Kuomintang government continued to administer the area as a separate province, reverting its name to Jehol Province, with its capital in Hailar. In 1955, the administration of the People's Republic of China divided the area between Hebei province, Liaoning Province, and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

Footnotes

References

Hedin, Sven (1933). Jehol: City of Emperors. Reprint (2000): Pilgrim's Book House, Varanasi. ISBN 81-7769-009-4. Forêt, Philippe (2000). "Mapping Chengde. The Qing Landscape Enterprise". 2000: University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. ISBN 08-2482-293-5.