Who ruled Vladivostok?

Vladivostok occupies a hilly peninsula on the Sea of Japan in the far south-east of Russia, close to the borders of China and North Korea. Its deep, sheltered bay, called the Golden Horn by the Russians, was the reason it was founded. The name means roughly "ruler of the East", and the city was built in 1860 to make that claim real: a naval base and port at the end of the empire's long reach across Siberia to the Pacific.

For most of its history the southern coast of the Primorye region was a frontier of states based further inland. The kingdom of Balhae (also written Parhae), founded in 698, and later the Jurchen Jin dynasty held the area, and remains of their towns and fortresses have been found nearby. The Mongol Empire and its successors claimed the region, and from the 17th century it formed part of the outer lands of the Qing dynasty, thinly populated by Udege, Nanai and other peoples, with Chinese fishermen and trappers who called the bay Haishenwai. The maps' "Russian Empire" colouring from 1815 is too early: the coast was still nominally Qing territory until 1860.

Weakened by the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion, the Qing gave up the land north of the Amur in the Treaty of Aigun of 1858 and the coast east of the Ussuri in the Convention of Peking of 1860. On 2 July 1860 a small detachment of soldiers landed from the transport ship Manchur and set up a military post. Vladivostok became a port in 1862, and in 1871 the main base of Russia's Pacific naval forces moved here from Nikolayevsk-on-Amur. Settlers came from European Russia and Ukraine, and many of the labourers and traders were Chinese and Korean.

In May 1891 the heir to the throne, the future Nicholas II, inaugurated work on the Trans-Siberian Railway at Vladivostok. Trains reached the city from Moscow by the early 1900s, first via a short cut through Manchuria, and an all-Russian route was completed in 1916. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905 the city's cruisers raided Japanese shipping, but Russia's defeat left Japan the leading power in Korea and southern Manchuria.

After the Russian Revolution, Vladivostok became a base for foreign intervention in the civil war. Japanese, American, British and other troops landed in 1918, along with the Czechoslovak Legion making its way home, and anti-Bolshevik governments came and went. The last Japanese forces left on 25 October 1922, and in November 1922 the city passed to Soviet Russia when the short-lived Far Eastern Republic was merged into the Russian Soviet republic.

Under the Soviet Union, Vladivostok was the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet and a transit point for prisoners bound for the labour camps of Kolyma; the poet Osip Mandelstam died in a transit camp here in 1938. In 1937 the Soviet authorities deported the region's Korean population to Central Asia. From 1958 the city was closed to foreigners, and it reopened only in 1992.

Since then Vladivostok has developed as Russia's main gateway to East Asia, handling trade with China, Japan and South Korea. Bridges across the Golden Horn and to Russky Island were built for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit of 2012. The city has around 600,000 inhabitants and remains the home of the Pacific Fleet.