The town emerged as an important commercial harbour; however, due to navigational difficulties caused by the sandbanks in the Amur estuary and because sea ice made the harbour unusable for five months each year, the main Russian shipping activities in the Pacific transferred to the better situated Vladivostok in the early 1870s. The town remained the administrative centre of this region until 1880, when the governor relocated to Khabarovsk. Anton Chekhov, visiting the town on his journey to Sakhalin in 1890, noted its rapid depopulation, although this trend slowed somewhat in the late 1890s with the discovery of gold and the establishment of salmon fisheries.