Sakhalin’s name means black, after the Amur’s mouth
Sakhalin, Russia’s great Northeast Asian island, lies only 6.5 kilometres from Khabarovsk Krai at its north and about 40 kilometres from Hokkaido at its south. The name comes from Manchu Sahaliyan—“black”—in the phrase for an island at the mouth of the Black River, the Amur.
Qing writers also called the island Kuyedao, island of the Ainu, or Kuye Fiyaka. The Kuye element probably echoes kuyi, the name Nivkh and Nanai neighbours gave the Sakhalin Ainu, and Chinese records describe a strong Kui presence on the mainland in country otherwise held by Nivkh and other Amur peoples. Ainu leaders accepted titles and paid tribute to the Yuan, Ming and Qing courts under varying degrees of pressure.
The Japanese name Karafuto has no agreed origin. Suggestions include the Mongolian karahoton, distant fortress; a twist on Karahito, Chinese person, after traders on the island; dialect words for prawns or plentiful herring; or a clipped Ainu phrase for the island God made at the estuary. Sakhalin Ainu themselves said Yankemosir, land of the mainland, or Karahto, and late eighteenth-century travellers such as Lapérouse and Langsdorff wrote Tschoka, perhaps from an Ainu word meaning we.
People lived here in the Neolithic, leaving Siberian-style flint tools at Dui and Kusunai, polished stone axes, decorated pottery and net weights; a later bronze-using population built earthen walls and left shell mounds on Aniva Bay. The Ainu traditionally held the south, the Oroks the centre and the Nivkhs the north. After the Mongols overthrew the Jin in 1234 they faced Nivkh and Udege raids, and in 1263 they set up a post at Nurgan, where the Amgun meets the Amur, to force submission.
China, Russia and Japan contested the island over roughly a thousand years, and rivalry between Russia and Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought wars and partitions. It is now part of Russia.
Source: Sakhalin
