The first seigniory, Côte-Saint-Sulpice, was granted to the explorer and fur trader René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle in 1667, with the first French settlers arriving at the beginning of 1669.

On August 4, 1689, more than 1500 Mohawk warriors raided the small village and burned it to the ground in retaliation for the ravaging of the Seneca lands, which the governor of New France, the Marquis de Denonville, was accused of having committed.

The name was adopted when the parish of Saints-Anges-de-la-Chine was created in 1676,[7] with the form "Lachine" appearing with the opening of a post office in 1829.

[8] An alternative etymology attributes the name to the famous French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who also hoped to find a passage from the Saint Lawrence River to China.

According to this version, in 1618 Champlain proposed that a customs house would tax the trade goods from China passing this point, hence the name Lachine.

[10] The borough is bordered to the northwest by the city of Dorval, to the northeast by Saint-Laurent, to the east by Côte Saint-Luc, Montreal West and a narrow salient of Le Sud-Ouest, and to the south by LaSalle.

Around the canal's inlet, in the southern part of the borough, are located The Fur Trade at Lachine National Historic Site, René Lévesque Park (on a long peninsula extending into Lac Saint-Louis), and the Musée de Lachine, which has collections of modern outdoor sculpture both on its own grounds, in René Lévesque Park, and in other sites throughout the borough.