Anke Wang

This project examines the extraction of natural resources in the Gulf of Tonkin from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Bordered by southern China and northern Vietnam, the gulf offers an ideal geographical unit for studying the relationship between resource extraction and border management. The 1887 Sino-French delimitation project left much of the offshore waters unterritorialized. This uncertainty transformed the gulf into both a shared resource pool as well as a contested site to be integrated into the development agenda of colonial regimes and the emerging modern nation-state. Drawing on archives in French, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and English, this study seeks to enrich our understanding of how multilayered state-building projects shaped the formation of geo-modernity in maritime borderlands.