Zhoushan , formerly romanized as Chusan, is an urbanized archipelago with the administrative status of a prefecture-level city in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang. It consists of an archipelago of islands at the southern mouth of Hangzhou Bay, off the mainland city of Ningbo. The prefecture's city proper is Dinghai on Zhoushan Island, now administered as the prefecture's Dinghai District. During the 2020 census, Zhoushan Prefecture's population was 1,157,817, out of whom 882,932 lived in the built-up (or metro) area made of two urban districts of Dinghai and Putuo.
On 8 July 2011 the central government approved Zhoushan as Zhoushan Archipelago New Area, a state-level new area.
History
The archipelago was inhabited 6,000 years ago during the Neolithic by people of the Hemudu culture. During the Spring and Autumn period, Zhoushan was called Yongdong, referring to its location east of the Yong River. At the time, it belonged to the state of Yue. The fishermen and sailors who inhabited the islands often engaged in piracy and became recruits for uprisings against the central authorities. At the time of the Eastern Jin, the Zhoushan Islands served as the base for Sun En's rebellion. Sun En, an adherent of the Taoist sect the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, launched his rebellion around the year 400 and was defeated by Jin forces in 402. Today's Zhoushan was first created as in Ming Prefecture in 738 under the Tang.
In 863, the Japanese Buddhist monk and a Putuoshan local Zhang-shi () placed a statue of Guanyin at Chaoyin Cave () that would later become a popular tourist and pilgrim destination. In 1073, under the Song, it was renamed ; this was upgraded to a prefecture in the early Yuan dynasty. During the Ming dynasty, especially between the years 1530 and 1560, Japanese and Chinese pirates used Zhoushan as one of their principal bases from which they launched attacks as far as Nanjing; "the whole Chinese coast from northern Shandong to western Guangdong was ravaged to a distance of sixty miles inland."
After suppression of the pirates, Zhoushan became an important commercial port of entry. Under the early Qing dynasty, it played a similar role to Xiamen and Guangzhou as a frequent port of call for Western traders. Changguo Prefecture became within Zhejiang Province in 1688 under the Qing. The restriction of all European trade to the port of Guangzhou in 1760 forced Westerners to leave Zhoushan. One of the requests of Lord Macartney's embassy to the Qianlong Emperor in 1793 was an acquisition of "a small unfortified island near Zhoushan for the residence of English traders, storage of goods, and outfitting of ships." The Qianlong Emperor denied this request together with all the rest.
British forces under Captain Charles Elliot captured Zhoushan on 5–6 July 1840 during the First Opium War and evacuated it in early 1841, after Elliot reached an agreement with Qishan, the Governor-General of Tianjin and Grand Secretary to the Daoguang Emperor, in exchange for Hong Kong. At that time, Zhoushan was a well known port while Hong Kong was still only a fishing village. The British Foreign Secretary Palmerston was furious when he learned that Elliot agreed to the cede Zhoushan for Hong Kong, described as "a barren island with hardly a house on it" Elliot was dismissed in April 1841 for his blunder. His replacement Sir Henry Pottinger led a British fleet that recaptured Zhoushan on 1 October 1841. The First Opium War ended with conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing in which China opened up the cities of Guangzhou ("Canton"), Fuzhou ("Foochow"), Xiamen ("Amoy"), Ningbo ("Ningpo"), and Shanghai to residence by British subjects for the purpose of trade. As a result, Britain no longer had any use for Zhoushan but it kept the island until 1846 as a guarantee for the fulfilment of the stipulations of the treaty. Dinghai was upgraded to a directly controlled subprefecture () sometime in 1841.
Zhoushan was also occupied by the British in 1860 during the Second Opium War. Wang Yijun, a leader of the Taiping rebels, attempted to retake Zhoushan from its Qing garrison on 13 February 1862 but was defeated and killed.