Lachine

City in Québec, Canada, on Lake St Louis, 11 km/7 mi southwest of Montréal; population (1991) 35,300. Steel bridges, wire, electrical apparatus, motors and equipment, and aeroplane engines are manufactured here. There is a canal link with Montréal, circumventing the Lachine Rapids of the St Lawrence River and forming part of the St Lawrence Seaway, which allows ocean-going vessels to Navigate from Montréal to the Great Lakes.

The area was granted in the 1670s to the explorer René La Salle, and acquired its name (‘China’) in sardonic reference to his constant, unsuccessful search for a route west to Asia. French settlers were massacred here by Iroquois in a raid in August 1689.