The County That Kept Changing Province

The town at the centre of Jizhou District has changed its administrative name more often than most places in north China. In February 1913, when the new republic abolished the prefecture, Jizhou (蓟州) became Ji County (蓟县). In 1928, when Zhili Province was renamed, the county passed to Hebei. Through the 1930s and 1940s it was administered in turn by a Japanese-backed autonomous government, by the Ji Eastern Dao and by the Yenching Dao. What did not change was the ground: the county seat that the 1944 gazetteer still lists as the inner-city township, and the two old temples standing inside it.

For a few years the county was much larger than the town. On 20 December 1958 the State Council abolished Sanhe County and merged it, together with the Dachang Hui Autonomous County, into Ji County. On 21 April 1960 the enlarged county was transferred to Tianjin. The arrangement did not last: on 1 June 1962 the State Council restored Sanhe County. Read as a sequence, these decisions describe how the new state reorganised the north China countryside, merging counties to make them administrable, assigning them to the city that needed their land and water, then splitting them again when the arrangement proved unworkable.

In August 1973 the State Council placed Ninghe, Ji County and three other counties under Tianjin, and the modern shape of the municipality was settled. Ji County then stayed a county while its neighbours changed: in September 2015 Jinghai and Ninghe were converted into districts, which left Ji County as the only county in Tianjin. In June 2016 the State Council approved its abolition and the creation of Jizhou District on exactly the same territory. For comparison, the 1944 gazetteer counted fifty-nine townships and 1,073 natural villages; the district that replaced the county is the same ground under a newer word.