Taba is an Egyptian town near the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. Taba is the location of one of Egypt's busiest border crossings. It is the northernmost resort of Egypt's Red Sea Riviera. In 1906, Taba became the center of a territorial dispute between the British Empire and the Ottoman Empire, known as the "Taba Crisis." Although the Sinai Peninsula was nominally Ottoman, it had been largely administered by Egypt, except for the Aqaba region, which had been officially under Ottoman administration since 1892. When the Ottomans began plans to extend the Hejaz railway to the Gulf of Aqaba, potentially challenging British influence in the Red Sea via the Suez Canal, Britain dispatched Lieutenant Bramly with a small Egyptian force to establish police stations in the region. Upon encountering Ottoman troops already positioned in Taba — territory the British claimed as Egyptian — they demanded the immediate evacuation of Taba. The Ottomans refused, threatening to open fire, which led the British to deploy the battleship Diana to the area. After several months of escalating tensions that threatened to spark an international conflict, with Taba as the only place the British considered Egyptian that the Ottomans refused to evacuate, Sultan Abdul Hamid II finally agreed to withdraw from Taba on 13 May 1906. Both Britain and the Ottoman Empire then agreed to demarcate a formal border that would run approximately straight from Rafah in a south-easterly direction to a point on the Gulf of Aqaba, not less than 5 kilometres from Aqaba. The border was initially marked with telegraph poles and these were later replaced by boundary pillars.
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