Name: The World's Strangest Borders Part 1: Panhandles
Uploaded: 2017-06-20T18:34:08.000Z
Duration: 6 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Countries in the world come in all different shapes and sizes.

Adverbs of manner

shapes, like these, and others, well, not so much.

Borders are a funny thing and don't often

make sense without some historical or geographical

Sometimes borders take on an exceptionally bizarre look,

extending away from the home country like a tentacle,

This is called a panhandle, or a salient,

and we are going to look at five of the strangest examples

to look at this example, the province of Trieste.

This province extends 48 kilometers, or 30 miles down

the coast away from Italy and into Slovenia.

History is the reason why this situation exists today.

to be a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

And outside of Battlefield 1, nobody has ever

because World War I happened, and Italy took over a bunch

But then Mussolini happened, and Italy lost World War II

and, therefore, lost pretty much all of that territory

Trieste became an independent city-state under UN protection

in 1947, but that only lasted until 1954,

when the tiny country's territory was divided

remains the border of today, and that is why the border here

Next up at number four, we are going pretty far away,

to India, which looks mostly normal, except for this mesh

Zooming in a little closer, we can see that this side of India

by only a very tiny sliver of land known as the Siliguri

This awkward situation, like every other entry

on this list from here on out, came about as a result

When India gained independence from the United Kingdom

in 1947, the British decided to partition India between a Hindu

Pakistan became the Muslim part and, at the time,

consisted of West Pakistan here and East Pakistan here.

Pakistan was separated by all of India from her two halves.

At one point, the corridor is not even 27 kilometers,

The Indian state of Sikkim extends north of the corridor

And they connects to the seven other Indian states

in the east, with a population of almost 45 million people

to the rest of their country by a corridor that, at one point,

We're going to move slightly up north to Afghanistan

Much like how an appendix serves no clear purpose to humans

any longer, the Wakhan corridor in Afghanistan

It is a part of Afghanistan that stretches out for a very long

In width, the corridor varies from between just 13 kilometers

The corridor means that Afghanistan shares a tiny land

border with China and completely separates Tajikistan

It doesn't make much sense now, but pushing the clock back

over a century explains why it exists today.

In the 19th century, the Russian and British empires

Russia ruled Central Asia, and Britain ruled India.

To settle a dispute between either empire gaining more land

agreed to respect Afghanistan as an independent country that

would serve as a buffer region between them.

But the borders of Afghanistan at the time

didn't exactly match up between the Russian

to expand Afghanistan 350 kilometers east to fit

remains, but as a border between Tajikistan and Pakistan.

in Africa, whose colonial past is obvious

when you look at the continent's borders.

We're going to start with the Democratic Republic

of the Congo, which has not one, but two, panhandles.

The Congo used to be a colony of Belgium.

And the Belgians created this one on the left

could access their enormous colony from the ocean.