The Territory of Christmas Island is a small, non self-governing territory of Australia located in the Indian Ocean, 2,360 km (1,466 miles) northwest of Perth in Western Australia and 500 km (310 miles) south of Jakarta, ► Indonesia.
This section holds a short summary of the history of the area of present-day Christmas Island, illustrated with maps, including historical maps of former countries and empires that included present-day Christmas Island.
Christmas Island, discovered by the Dutch explorer W. Mynors on Christmas Eve 1743, is annexed by the United Kingdom in 1888. It becomes part of the Straits Settlements, later Singapore, in 1900. This continues - interrupted by a Japanese occupation between 1942 and 1945 until 1957. Starting 1958 Christmas Island becomes an Australian territory and is governed as part of mainland Australia.
Notes and references
General remarks:
The WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Atlas of the World is an organized and commented collection of geographical, political and historical maps available at Wikimedia Commons. The main page is therefore the portal to maps and cartography on Wikimedia. That page contains links to entries by country, continent and by topic as well as general notes and references.
Every entry has an introduction section in English. If other languages are native and/or official in an entity, introductions in other languages are added in separate sections. The text of the introduction(s) is based on the content of the Wikipedia encyclopedia. For sources of the introduction see therefore the Wikipedia entries linked to. The same goes for the texts in the history sections.
Historical maps are included in the continent, country and dependency entries.
The status of various entities is disputed. See the content for the entities concerned.
The maps of former countries that are more or less continued by a present-day country or had a territory included in only one or two countries are included in the atlas of the present-day country. For example the Ottoman Empire can be found in the Atlas of Turkey.
