As a portion of the Guandong Leased Territories (Guandong zhou), the city of Dalian came under the territorial control of Russia from 1898 until that country’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The Russians called the city Dalniy (Russian: Дальний), which means “distant” or "remote", describing the city's location relative to the Russian heartland while also being a sort of transliteration of the Chinese ‘Dalian’.