" were charted by
La Pérouse in 1787. The land adjacent to it from the west was referred to at the time as the "
Chinese Tartary"
Yuan dynasty During the
Yuan dynasty, the Yuan armies crossed the strait in the
Mongol invasions of Sakhalin. Alleged remnants of a Chinese fort dating back to the Mongol Yuan era can be found in Sakhalin today. "
Tartary" is an older name used by Europeans to refer to a vast region covering
Inner Asia,
Central Asia and
North Asia. The toponym is derived from the medieval ethnonym
Tartars, which was applied to various
Turkic and
Mongol semi-
nomadic empires, including the Yuan dynasty that ruled over China and the straits of Northeast Asia. and Manchuria (and Mongolia) became known to the Europeans as the "Chinese Tartary". Accordingly, when
La Pérouse charted most of the strait between Sakhalin and the mainland "Chinese Tartary" in 1787, the body of water received the name of the Strait (or Channel, or Gulf) of Tartary. In
Japan, the strait is named after
Mamiya Rinzō, who traveled to the strait in 1808 whereof the name was introduced by
Philipp Franz von Siebold in his book
Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan (1832–54). and the Strait of Tartary. On Russian maps, the short narrowest section of the strait (south of the mouth of the Amur) is called
Nevelskoy Strait, after Admiral
Gennady Nevelskoy, who explored the area in 1848; the body of water north of there, into which the Amur River flows, is the
Amur Liman; and the name of "Strait of Tartary" is reserved for the largest section of the body of water, south of
Nevelskoy Strait. The Tartar Strait was a puzzle to European explorers since, when approached from the south, it becomes increasingly shallow and looks like the head of a bay. In 1787
La Perouse decided not to risk it and turned south even though locals had told him that Sakhalin was an island. In 1797
William Broughton also decided that the Gulf of Tartary was a bay and turned south. In 1805
Adam Johann von Krusenstern failed to penetrate the strait from the north.
Mamiya Rinzō's journey of 1808 was little known to Europeans.
Gennady Nevelskoy passed the strait from the north in 1848. The Russians kept this a secret and
used it to evade a British fleet during the Crimean War.
Recent history S-117 was a
Soviet Shchuka class submarine that was lost on or about December 15, 1952, due to unknown causes in the Strait of Tartary in the
Sea of Japan. The boat may have collided with a
surface ship or struck a
mine. All forty-seven crewmen died in the incident. The southeastern part of the Strait of Tartary was the site of one of the tensest incidents of the Cold War, when on September 1, 1983,
Korean Air Lines Flight 007, carrying 269 people including a sitting U.S. congressman,
Larry McDonald, strayed into the Soviet air space and was attacked by a Soviet
Su-15 interceptor just west of
Sakhalin Island. The plane came down on the waters off the strait's only land mass,
Moneron Island. An intensive naval search by the U.S. with assistance of Japanese and Korean vessels
was carried on in a area of the strait just north of Moneron Island. ==1956 causeway proposal==