page_title: Hankou
section_title: Foreign concessions period
hierarchical_section_title: Hankou / History / Foreign concessions period
caption_attribution_description: English: The National Revolutionary Army enters Wuhan in 1926 - NRA troops capturing British concessions in Hankou during the Northern Expedition. From zh and en wikipedia
context_page_description: Hankou, alternately romanized as Hankow, was one of the three towns merged to become modern-day Wuhan city, the capital of the Hubei province, China. It stands north of the Han and Yangtze Rivers where the Han flows into the Yangtze. Hankou is connected by bridges to its triplet sister towns Hanyang and Wuchang.
  Hankou is the main port of Hubei province and the single largest port in the middle reaches of Yangtze.
context_section_description: Hankou used to have five foreign concessions belonging to the United Kingdom (115 acres (47 ha), est. 1862), France (60 acres (24 ha), est. 1886), Russia (60 acres (24 ha), est. 1886), Germany (100 acres (40 ha), est. 1895) and Japan (32 acres (13 ha), est. 1898). The German and Russian concessions ended in 1917 and 1920 respectively and those areas were administered by the Chinese government as the First and the Second Special Area.
  Early in 1927, the British concession was occupied in the course of the revolutionary troubles that accompanied the Northern Expedition when the Chinese Kuomintang forces occupied the concession and showed no intention of withdrawing. The Chen-O'Malley Agreement of February 1927 provided for a combined British-Chinese administration of the concession and in 1929 the British concession formally came to an end. From then on it was administered by the Chinese authorities as the Third Special Area.
  In the 1920s and 30s, Hankou was one of the Yangtze River ports patrolled by the US Navy to maintain US interests in the area (Yangtze Patrol.)
  Hankou was flooded in the 1931 China floods.
  Hankou was captured by the Japanese invaders in 1938 (Battle of Wuhan). The Chinese-born writer Han Suyin's novel Destination Chungking (1942) has a significant chapter at its beginning which describes the retreat from Hankou of China's Nationalist Government forces in front of Japan's army and air force invasion in 1938, as part of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It is partly autobiographical, as Han Suyin's first husband was an officer with China Nationalist army.
  An important logistical center, the city was heavily bombed in December 1944 by the US aircraft based in the Chengdu area (part of Operation Matterhorn).
  The government of Vichy France relinquished the French concession in 1943, and the restored French Republic relinquished it formally in 1946.
  The Japanese concession came to an end with the surrender of Japan in 1945.
  Before the Communist Revolution, Hankou was the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Hankou, covering the province of Hubei. The dioceses in Wuchang, Hanyang and elsewhere in the province were subordinated to it.
caption: Chinese Kuomintang soldiers marching into the British concession during the Northern Expedition
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