From Qin (Ch’in) to Cathay: Names for China and the Chinese on the Silk Road

Abstract

This article examines the many names for China given to her by neighbouring peoples from the Han to the Yuan periods using documents from the Silk Road. It also surveys the many names given to the Middle Kingdom in Chinese (including Buddhist and ‘Nestorian’ Christian) sources and asks why these were not reflected in the way in which China was named by her neighbours and foreign occupiers.

A few years ago, while I was working in the basement-office of the excellent research library of the Ancient India and Iran Trust at Cambridge (UK), the Trust was visited, with virtually no warning, by a party of diplomats and scholars from Uzbekistan who spoke little or no English. By a happy coincidence, working in the same subterranean office was the Canadian scholar Mark Dickens, now a much-published author on the history of Christianity along the Silk Road. Mark had taught English in Uzbekistan before and, much to the delight of our visitors, was able to converse with them fluently in their own language. However, not to ignore me utterly, one of the Uzbek delegates came up to me and, in faltering English, asked: ‘Are you Qitoy?’ It took me more than a few seconds to comprehend his question. As a scholar of Central Asian texts, I knew more or less that he was asking me whether I am ‘Chinese’. However, what fascinated me was the word he used for a ‘Chinese’ person as it is tantamount to asking an English man or woman, ‘Are you Caledonian (i.e., Scottish)? or Hibernian (i.e., Irish)?’ I thought then that my interlocutor must have been brought up on works about China dating back to Marco Polo, since the most common names for ‘China’ and ‘Chinese’ in European languages (e.g., Chine/Chinois, Cina/cinese, Kina/chinesisch, Κίνα/Κινέζος and the like) are derived from the Chinese dynastic name of Qin 秦 (pronounced Ch’in/Ts’in, MC dzin), not from ‘Cathay’ as ‘Qitoy’ obviously was. What I did not realise at the time was that our Uzbek visitor was not asking me a pedantic question based on his knowledge of Late Medieval literature about China, but that Xitoy, like Kitaytsy (китайцы) in Russian, is the standard word for both ‘Chinese’ and China in his native Uzbek language. For a Central Asian scholar like myself, however, ‘Cathay’ is not just a simple alternative to ‘China’ in Western languages, because it is not derived etymologically or historically from Qin—the title of the dynasty which first united ‘China’. Instead, it comes from Kitaia, the ‘Khitans’, who belonged to a Turkic tribe that ruled Northern China between 907 and 1216. This tribe is better known to Medieval scholars as the Qara Khitai (Black Khitans) who briefly dominated West Central Asia from c. 1130 to c. 1220. ¹

Since that encounter, I have made a note of every form of the name for China (often referred to as the Middle Kingdom) in the course of reading texts in a variety of languages from the Silk Road. My research is greatly complicated by the fact that throughout China’s long history, her inhabitants have called themselves and their native land by a variety of names, a fact that did not go unnoticed by foreign observers. In his description of the Kingdom of Cathay, the author of the History of (the Armenia King) Hayton (r. 1224–71 CE) remarked:

All the people of that empire are called Cathayans, but they have also other names according to the special nation to which they belong…. These Cathayans have a very elegant written character (sic), which in beauty in some sort resembles the Latin letters. ²

Like descendants of other ancient civilisations with long and chequered histories, the Chinese share the same fate as modern Greeks and Egyptians in having an external name (i.e., an exonym) which is generally used in Western European languages but one which is not etymologically related to how they call themselves in their own language(s) (i.e., their endonym). Since the time of Thucydides, the Greeks have called themselves Hellenes (Ἕλληνες, Mod. Έλληνες) after ancient Hellas (Ἑλλάς, Mod. Ελλάδα); the official name of their modern nation is the Hellenic Republic (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία). However, in the West, we generally follow the Roman practice of calling the Hellenes after forms of the Latin name Graecia, which was originally applied only to Central Greece north of the Isthmus, and which became the name by which the Hellenes were known to the Italic peoples who dwelt on the opposite side of the Tyrrhenian Sea. ³ Although the Romans used the name Achaea for Greece, Graecia/Greece became so popular in Latin literature that it remained in most Western languages. Unusually, the name for Greece in Modern Chinese, viz. Xila 希臘 is directly derived from Hellas and not from Graecia. This is also, I believe, the case with the name for Greece in Norwegian (Hellas) but not in Swedish (Grekland) or Finnish (Kreikka). History, however, complicates matters further for the Greeks even in ancient times. Diasporan Greeks in Asia Minor at the time of the Persian Wars and later, along the Silk Road, were known firstly as Yūnān (e.g., Skt. Yonas from Ionians Ἴωνες) ⁴ and later as Rumi (from Ῥωμαῖοι Rōmaioi, i.e., Romans), and both forms of the name are still currently used in Modern Turkish to distinguish the very few Turkish citizens of Greek descent (viz. Rumler) from Yunanlılar, that is, citizens of the modern state of Greece (Yunanistan). Similarly, since ancient times Egypt had been known as Miṣr in almost all Semitic languages, but ‘Egypt’, derived from the Graeco-Roman name for the Land of the Pharaohs, viz. (Gr.) Αἴγυπτος and (Lat.) Aegypta, tends to be the dominant form in most languages (Egypte, Ägypten, Αίγυπτος, Египет, 埃及 Aiji), although the ancient name Miṣr predominates in almost all modern Middle Eastern languages, for example, Arabic (miṣr مِصر) ⁵ and Hebrew (msryh מצרים). Interestingly, Egypt was known as Misire (mixier 米昔兒/misier 密思兒) to the bureaucrats of Ming China but the name did not last long, as missions from the Mamluks to the Ming court continued only for a few decades. ⁶

Today the semi-official and the most common name for China in the Chinese language is Zhongguo 中國 (Chung-kuo), that is, ‘the Middle Kingdom’—a term which bears no phonological or etymological link to the name ‘China’ in Western languages. However, only neighbouring countries that use or used the Chinese script or that have been significantly influenced by China in their culture (e.g., Japan, Korea and Vietnam) refer to China by the Chinese preferred name of Zhongguo (Jap. 中国 Chūgoku, Kor. 중국 Jung-gug, Viet. Trung Quốc). The vast majority of countries outside the cultural influence of the Middle Kingdom refer to her by different forms of Qin (Ch’in, Chin, Sin), with the outstanding exception, as mentioned earlier, of a block of countries which follow the Cathay tradition in calling China ‘Kitay’ (i.e., Cathay) (e.g., Russian: Китай Kitay, Belarusian: Кітай Kitaj, Uzbek: Qitoy, Kazak: Қытай Qitay, Slovenian: Kitajska). However, the membership of this club of ‘Cathayan’ nations is so small—even major Slavonic peoples like Serbs and Croats call China ‘Kina’ (Кина)—that it is forgivable not to know that there is a Central Asian and Slavonic tradition for naming all Chinese after a historic Altaic minority from Central Asia, viz. the Khitans.

Unlike Western-trained experts on the Silk Road, most modern-day Chinese, if asked about the origin of the name ‘China’, are unlikely to suggest a link between the dynastic name of Qin with ‘China’ or ‘Kina’ because the name of the first dynasty of China (i.e., Qin) is full of negative associations in Chinese culture. Furthermore, as most overseas Chinese and residents of the Special Autonomous Region (SAR) of Hong Kong speak the Cantonese dialect, in which the dynastic name (and the rare surname) of Qin is pronounced ceon or cheon, the phonetic link between ‘Qin’ and ‘China’ is further diminished. When pressed, the most likely answer one would get is that the modern/Western name of ‘China’ is derived from Zhina 支那 (pronounced Chih-na)—an allegedly foreign name, but one of known antiquity to most Chinese and one which bears distinct phonetic similarity to the modern name of ‘China’. In fact, the bi-nom Zhina, written with the exact same Chinese characters 支那 but pronounced shina, was, until the middle of the last century, widely used in the Japanese language for the Chinese nation because the Japanese people would prefer to reserve the more respectful title of Zhongguo 中國, that is, ‘the Middle Kingdom’ (Jap. Chūgoku), for the Hiroshima area in homeland Japan, and not for a state she had hopes to subjugate. The China Incident, the euphemism for the Sino-Japanese War (1938–45), was commonly referred to in Japanese as the Shina Jihen 支那变, and the puppet state created by Japanese occupation forces in China from 1937–45 was officially named Zhina gonghe guo 支那共和國, ‘the commonwealth of Shina’ (Jap. Shina Kyōwa-koku). Not surprisingly, Shina is now rightly regarded as a term of opprobrium, and its use to designate the People’s Republic of China in official Japanese publications is forbidden. However, as we shall see, the medieval name Zhina is of great relevance to our search for the ancient and medieval forms for the name of China, as it was widely used by Chinese Buddhist writers in the Tang era (618–907 CE) to designate that great empire north of the ‘Snowy Mountains’ (the Himalayas), that is, China.

In Search of a Foreign (Indic?) Origin

The cautious unwillingness to suggest a Chinese origin for the name of China is clearly reflected in the entry on ‘China’ in the Oxford English Dictionary ⁷ :

China: not a native Chinese name, but found in Sanskrit as China about the Christian era, and in various modified forms employed by the Asiatic peoples. In Marco Polo Chin, in Barbosa (1516) and Garcia de Orta (1563) China. So in English in Eden 1555. The origin of the name is unknown.

Eden, Decades of the New World (1555) (Arb.) 260: ‘The Great China whose kyng (sic) is thought…the greatest prince in the world’.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary, despite its high status as a reference work, is not the final word on the origin of foreign words in the English language. Hobson-Jobson—the equally scholarly and authoritative reference work on loan-words—has a lengthy and interesting article on ‘China’, parts of which deserve citing in full:

China: The European knowledge of this name in the forms Thinae and Sinae goes back nearly to the Christian era. The famous mention of the Sinim by the prophet Isaiah would carry us much further back, but we fear the possibility of that referring to the Chinese must be abandoned, as must be likewise, perhaps, the similar application of the name Chinas in ancient Sanskrit works. The most probable origin of the name—which is essentially a name applied by foreigners to the country—as yet suggested, is that put forward by Baron F. von Richthofen, that it comes from Jih-nan, an old name of Tongking, seeing that in Jih-nan lay the only port which was open for foreign trade with China at the beginning of our era, and that that province was then included administratively within the limits of China Proper (see Richthofen, China, i. 504–10; the same author’s papers in the Trans. of the Berlin Geog. Soc. for 1876; and a paper by one of the present writers in Proc. R. Geog. Soc., November 1882.)

Another theory has been suggested by our friend M. Terrien de la Couperie in an elaborate note, of which we can but state the general gist. Whilst he quite accepts the suggestion that Kiao-chi or Tongking, anciently called Kiao-ti, was the Kattigara of Ptolemy’s authority, he denies that Jih-nan can have been the origin of Sinae. This he does on two chief grounds: (1) That Jih-nan was not Kiao-chi, but a province a good deal further south, corresponding to the modern province of An (Nghé Ane, in the map of M. Dutreuil de Rhins, the capital of which is about 2° 17’ in lat. S. of Hanoi). This is distinctly stated in the Official Geography of Annam. An was one of the twelve provinces of Cochin China proper till 1820–41, when, with two others, it was transferred to Tongking. Also, in the Chinese Historical Atlas, Jih-nan lies in Chen Ching, i.e. Cochin-China. (2) That the ancient pronunciation of Jih-nan, as indicated by the Chinese authorities of the Han period, was Nit-nam. It is still pronounced in Sinico-Annamite (the most archaic of the Chinese dialects) Nhut-nam, and in Cantonese Yat-nam. M. Terrien further points out that the export of Chinese goods, and the traffic with the south and west, was for several centuries B.C. monopolised by the State of Tsen (now pronounced in Sinico-Annamite Chen, and in Mandarin Tien), which corresponded to the centre and west of modern Yun-nan. The She-ki of Szema Tsien (B.C. 91), and the Annals of the Han dynasty afford interesting information on this subject. When the Emperor Wu-ti, in consequence of Chang-Kien’s information brought back from Bactria, sent envoys to find the route followed by the traders of Shuh (i.e., Sze-chuen) to India, these envoys were detained by Tang-Kiang, King of Tsen, who objected to their exploring trade-routes through his territory, saying haughtily: ‘Has the Han a greater dominion than ours?’ M. Terrien conceives that as the only communication of this Tsen State with the Sea would be by the Song-Koi R., the emporium of sea-trade with that State would be at its mouth, viz. at Kiaoti or Kattigara. Thus, he considers the name of Tsen, this powerful and arrogant State, the monopoliser of trade routes, is in all probability that which spread far and wide the name of Chīn, Sīn, Sinae, Thinae, and preserved its predominance in the mouths of foreigners, even when, as in the 2nd century of our era, the great Empire of the Han has extended over the Delta of the Song-Koi.

This theory needs more consideration than we can now give it. But it will doubtless have discussion elsewhere, and it does not disturb Richthofen’s identification of Kattigara.

[Prof. Giles regards the suggestions of Richthofen and T. de la Couperie as mere guesses. From a recent reconsideration of the subject he has come to the conclusion that the name may possibly be derived from the name of a dynasty, Ch’in or Ts’in, which flourished B.C. 255–207 and became widely known in India, Persia and other Asiatic countries, the final a being added by the Portu­guese.] ⁸

The above entry in Hobson-Jobson is an admirable survey of early twentieth-century scholarship on the origin of the name of China, and some of the theories it summarises will be reviewed below in the present study. For Silk Road scholars, however, it is unfortunate that the theory that the name of China was somehow related to the dynastic title of Qin is mentioned only in passing at the very end of the entry and was not further developed by Sir Henry Yule, the contributor, who was a renowned scholar of East-West contacts.

‘Qin’ and Its Onomastic Legacy

Qin, the powerful but short-lived dynasty (221–06 BCE), which was the first of the regional states of the Zhou era to unite the Middle Kingdom, thus putting an end to the Warring States period (fourth century-221 BCE), was noted for the completion of the first phase of the Great Wall and even better known nowadays for the entombment of the Terracotta Army which was said to have guarded the entrance to the tomb of its most famous Emperor, Shi Huangdi 始皇帝 (lit. ‘Founding Emperor’, r. 221–09 BCE, often known as the First Emperor of Qin). The latter came to the throne at a time when Qin was one of half a dozen independent warring kingdoms which divided the territory we now call China. Backed by a strong military tradition and an efficient administration, Shi Huangdi was able to unite China by 221 BCE, declaring himself sole Emperor under Heaven. He also took Chinese power into Central Asia through subduing the Ordos Region in 215 BCE and extended administrative control to South China a year later. The map of the Qin Empire greatly resembles that of the modern state of China. Though he undertook the building of the first Great Wall, it was not a gesture of defeat in his wars against the Xiongnu 匈奴 (a nomadic people living north and north-west of China during the Qin and Han 漢, 206 BCE–220 CE) but an attempt to retain Chinese influence in Central Asia through having a strongly defended border protecting Chinese settlers in the frontier region. Scholars who support the suggestion that the dynastic title of this first unified and powerful China is the source of the name by which China would be known to her non-Chinese neighbours have an easy case to make and one which had been made several centuries before. In a Tibetan work known in English as the ‘Crystal Mirror of Siddhānta’ completed in 1740 by the C‘os-kyi Ñi-ma dPal-bzaṅ-po, the learned Lama who had studied in China, there is a remarkably modern explanation for the name of China—a kingdom which was also known as the Divine Land or Land of the Spirits (shentu 神土) to Chinese Buddhists:

The name of China in its own language is Sen-teu (i.e., shentu). It is identified by some authors with the Dvīpa Pūrvavideha (one of the four inhabited continents of Mount Sumeru). The people of India call it Mahā Tsīna, mahā meaning great, and Tsīna being a corruption of Ts’in. Among the sovereigns of China, Shi-huang, king of the country of Ts’in, became very powerful. He conquered the neighbouring peoples and made his power felt in most countries so that his name as king of Ts’in became known in remote regions of the world. In the course of time, by continual phonetic alteration, the name Ts’in passed into Tsin and then into Tsina or Tsīna, whence the Sanskrit designation Mahā Tsīna. ⁹

The evidence supporting this suggestion by our eighteenth-century Lama scholar is strong. As Yule had already pointed out in his entry on China in Hobson-Jobson, the earliest names for China in Greek sources that could be clearly identified as such are Thina and Sina(i), as found respectively in the anonymous Periplus Maris Erythrae ¹⁰ and in the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy. ¹¹ Moreover, names like Seres (Gr. Σῆρες ‘people of silk’) and Serica (Gr. Σηρική ‘land of silk’) found in Ptolemy, and once thought to be related to the word for silk in Chinese (絲 si), may also be related phonetically to Sin/Qin as the late James Hamilton has well explained:

As for Latin serica, ‘silk’, it was borrowed from the Greek serikon of the same meaning, just as Latin Seres ‘China’, was borrowed from the Greek Seres. Now the Greek name Seres for China, which goes back to at least the 2nd century B.C., must have come from the name of the great Qin dynasty that founded the first Chinese Empire towards the end of the 3rd century B.C. Indeed, at the time when the Chinese name Qin (EMC: *dzin <*dzen), was borrowed into Greek as Seres, the final -n of the Chinese must have sounded very much like the final -r of other languages, for it was then used regularly in Chinese to transcribe a foreign -r. ¹²

The discovery and subsequent decipherment of the so-called Sogdian Ancient Letters from the Cheng Han 成漢 period (306–47 CE) give considerable additional support to the theory that the dominant form of the name used for China in Central Asian and Indic languages is derived from the dynastic name of Qin. These letters were found in 1907 by Aurel Stein in a Chinese watch-tower just west of the Jade Gate, a fortified outpost guarding the western approaches to Dunhuang 燉煌. ¹³ They consisted of a small dossier of eight letters written to friends and relatives at Loulan 樓蘭 (Sogd. kr’wr’n) ¹⁴ and Samarkand, by Sogdian merchants who traded along the land-routes between Loulan and a number of key Chinese cities including Dunhuang (Sogd. drw’’n), ¹⁵ Luoyang 洛陽 (Sogd. srγ), ¹⁶ Chang’an 長安 (or Xianyang 咸陽, Sogd. ’xwmt’n), ¹⁷ Guzang (Sogd. kc’n), ¹⁸ Yeh (Sogd. ’nkp’), Jiuquan 酒泉 (Sogd. cwcn) ¹⁹ and Jincheng 金城 (Sogd. kmzyn). ²⁰ The date of these letters has long been a source of scholarly debate, especially because one of the letters mentioning the destruction of the city of Yeh by the Xwn—the Middle Iranian name for Huns and probably used by the author of the letter to mean the dreaded Xiongnu 匈奴. ²¹ Internal evidence points to a date of composition for all five letters to c. 313/4 CE, viz. the end of the short-lived Western Jin (Xijin 西晉) dynasty (265–316 CE). The Sogdian merchants refer to China in their letters firstly as ‘(The Land) Inside’ (Sogd. [c]ntry) ²² which is highly appropriate as China was then probably referred to by the Chinese themselves as (the country) ‘within the Passes’ (guanzhong 關中). However, the author of one of the letters refers to the Chinese as ‘Čīn (cyn)’ and ‘the land of the Čīn’ as Čīnastan (cynstn). ²³ The latter might have been the source of the unique form of the name for ‘the Land of Silk’ (i.e., China) Τζίνιτζα (var. Τζίνη) found only in the writing of the early Byzantine seafarer and cosmologist Cosmas Indicopleustes (sixth century CE). ²⁴

In Sogdian, the use of Čin (cyn) for Chinese is also extended to their homeland as found in another typical Sogdian mercantile letter recovered from Turfan. ²⁵ Furthermore, in a beautifully copied double-page from a Middle Persian Manichaean hymn-book known to scholars as the Maḥrnāmag, which contains a large number of Sogdian and Turkish words, we find the name for a ‘China-town’ (i.e., a colony of Chinese settlers) in the Tarim Basin given as Čīnānčkanδ (cynʾncknδ) ²⁶ —an important Sogdian derivation from Čin to which I will return. The same name is found identically spelt in Sogdian script (cynʾncknδ) in two recently published Sogdian letters, and there is a strong possibility that the town in question is none other than Qočo—the capital city of the Uygur Kingdom—which shows the level of Chinese influence at the court of the Khagan in the same way that to this day the Chinese call Seoul, the capital of South Korea, Hancheng 漢城 ‘Han/China-city’. ²⁷ The naming of China and the Chinese as ‘Čīn (cyn)’ in Sogdian is particularly telling as it is a one-syllable word and is obviously based on a single Chinese character which could only be Qin 秦. The adoption of Qin as the name for China by the most active trading people on the Silk Road testifies to the rise of the state of Qin to a position of eminence, first in the western part of the empire and later over its whole area, with the result that its name would come to represent China itself in languages of the Silk Road long after the demise of the power and influence of the Qin dynasty.

Han and the Damnatio Memoriae of Qin

The most learned and determined advocate of the theory that the name ‘China’ was derived from ‘Qin’ was undoubtedly the French Sinologue and Central Asian scholar Paul Pelliot (1878–945). He first published his views in a major study on Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage accounts in 1904 ²⁸ and returned to the subject in 1912 as a response to the counter-views of Berthold Laufer. ²⁹ His final views on the debate are well summarised in the article on ‘Cin’ in his posthumously published notes for his planned commentary on Marco Polo. ³⁰ Pelliot’s view was not without its critics, and, as already mentioned, one of the earliest calls for revision was made by Laufer, who was the father of Sino-Iranian studies. ³¹ The first of Laufer’s several main criticisms is that the Chinese rarely, if ever, then and now, call themselves Qinren 秦人 ‘people of Qin’:

One of the several objections that could be raised against the derivation of China from Ts’in is that the Chinese people never called themselves after the Ts’in for whom their scholars professed thorough contempt, while they freely named themselves (and still do so) ‘sons of Han’ or ‘Han people’, and in the south also ‘T’ang people’. ³²

The title of the short-lived Qin dynasty which first united China after the Warring States period is redolent with negative nuances. Despite his many achievements mentioned earlier, the founding emperor, was a strong adherent of the Legalist School and was notorious for his arbitrary rule and harsh treatment of Confucian scholar-officials. His reign was so demonised that few Chinese nowadays would readily identify themselves as ‘Men of Qin’. Moreover, the late (Chairman) Mao Zedong was an avowed admirer of the Legalist School of government, and the ‘Gang of Four’ who succeeded Mao was immediately denounced as a ‘Qin-clique’ by its political opponents. The suggestion, therefore, that the most used Western-language name of ‘China’ could be derived from Qin runs into a potential political quagmire for scholars based in Mainland China. On the other hand, Han, the successor dynasty that governed China continuously for three centuries has been regarded by Chinese since the Middle Ages as a golden era. The term Hanren 漢人 (people of Han) has remained the standard term for the ethnic Chinese, viz. people of Chinese-descent who are not members of an ethnic minority, that is, not Tibetan, Uygur, Manchu, Mongol, Miao or the like.

Pelliot showed, in defence of his view, that terms such as Qinren 秦人 ‘men of Qin’ and Qinwen 秦文 ‘language of Qin’ (i.e., Chinese language) continued to be found in Chinese historical texts. ³³ To his list of examples a few additional references can now be noted:

The early Buddhist pilgrim Faxian 法顯 (Fa-hsien) (337-c. 422 CE) in the account of his travels in India (399–414 CE) uses both Han di 漢地, lit. ‘Land of Han’, ³⁴ to designate China, and Qintu 秦土, lit. ‘the soil, that is, territory of Qin’, to mean both the former kingdom of Qin, with its capital in Xianyang (near the Chang’an of later periods, modern Xi’an), and China generally. ³⁵

The terms Qinshamen 秦沙門 ‘monk from Qin’ and Qin(wen) 秦(文) ‘the Qin = Chinese (language)’ are found in a collection of Buddhist colophons from the fourth to the fifth centuries CE and in contexts which unambiguously imply the state or language of the whole of China. ³⁶

The term Qin was still used to mean China, albeit rhetorically, on a Chinese language inscription dated as late as 1280 CE, that is, in the Mongol period, recorded by Pelliot himself on 13 August 1908. ³⁷

The territory that comprised the state of Qin continued to be called by that name until well into the Tang period. Although Qin was not commonly used to indicate the whole of China after the demise of the Qin dynasty, it was still used to refer to the north-western region of China, the region which borders on the eastern end of the Silk Road. As a reign or monarchical title, Qin continued to be used by would-be sovereigns who wanted to show strength and a desire for unity against fragmentation. There were at least a dozen princes and pretenders who included Qin among their royal titles.

However, these examples do not negate the fact that the majority of the Chinese after the accession of the Han dynasty in 206 BCE readily identified themselves as Hanren (‘people of Han’) or later as Tangren 唐人 (‘people of Tang’) after the politically successful and culturally iconic Tang 唐 dynasty (618–907 CE).

Because hardly any text from the short-lived Qin period has survived, and because it is assumed in most literary texts that they were written in China for the Chinese, terms for China are not easy to find in surviving literature from the Qin-Han period. One exception, however, is its use in the accounts of China’s dealings with her neighbours as recorded in the relevant chapters of the continuous dynastic histories beginning with the famous Shiji 史記 of Sima Qian 司馬遷 (c. 145–c. 88 BCE). Particularly informative are the chapters on the Western Regions in the [Qian] Hanshu [前]漢書 (History of the [Former] Han Dynasty) compiled by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92 CE) and the Hou Hanshu 後漢書 (History of the Later Han Dynasty) compiled by Fan Ye 范曄 (398–445 CE). In Chapter 96A of the Hanshu in particular we can see that the dynastic name of Han had come to signify not just the dynasty but the state, the territory ruled by the dynasty, the government, both civil and military, the people and the language and culture of China. A good example is a passage concerning the territory of Loulan:

However, Loulan was furthest east [of the states of the Western Regions]. It lay close to Han and confronted the White Dragon Mounds. The locality was short of water and pasture and was regularly responsible for sending out guides, conveying water, bearing provisions and escorting or meeting Han envoys. In addition the state was frequently robbed, reprimanded or harmed by officials or conscripts and found it inexpedient to keep in contact with Han. Later the state again conducted espionage for the Xiongnu, often intercepting and killing Han envoys. ³⁸

Zhongguo 中國 (Middle Kingdom)

The term Zhongguo 中國 (Chung-kuo), that is, ‘the Middle Kingdom’, may strike many Chinese as a modern endonym, since it is the abridged official name of China. Before the Revolution of 1912 which ended the rule of the Manchu dynasty, the official name for the state of China was the ‘Great Qing (i.e., Manchu) Empire’ (Da Qing Diguo 大清帝國) and the Chinese could not officially call themselves Zhongguo ren (people of the Middle Kingdom) until the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. The first official name of modern China after 1912, Zhonghua Min Guo 中華民國, lit. ‘The Middle Kingdom of the Chinese (hua) People’, contains a reference to both the Middle Kingdom and its citizens as People of Hua—a celebrated name for China of great antiquity but one of the many endonyms not used by non-Chinese speakers along the Silk Road. The official post-1949 name of China, Zhonghua Renmin Gonghe Guo 中華人民共和國, lit. ‘The Commonwealth of the Chinese (hua) People of the Middle Kingdom’, is merely an expansion of the same concept.

The Chinese have seen themselves as dwellers of ‘the Middle Kingdom’ vis à vis the non-Chinese ‘Barbarians’ since the time of Confucius, but it was at first more a theoretical concept than a political reality since China was fragmented for many centuries during the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States periods and was not united until the ascendancy of the Qin state. ³⁹ Nevertheless, there are instances in the writings attributed to Mencius (Mengzi 孟子) of its use as a collective term for the ‘central states’ vis à vis the ‘Four Barbarians’. ⁴⁰ A good example of a geographical use of the term concerns the sage Chen Liang 陳良, a native of the southern kingdom of Chu 楚 who emigrated ‘north to the Central States’. ⁴¹ The strengthening of the northern frontier through the embryonic ‘Great Wall’ by the First Emperor further consolidated the concept of the area under direct Qin rule as the ‘Middle Kingdom’. This view remained official under the Han government, and the History of the (Former) Han Dynasty (Hanshu) makes an important statement about the post-Qin northern boundary of the Middle Kingdom:

From the decline of the Zhou (dynasty), the Rong and Di peoples lived as elements of a mixed population to the north of the Jing and Wei rivers. By the time of the First Qin Emperor, the Rong and the Di were driven away and the long walls (i.e., the first Great Wall) were built to form a boundary for the Middle Kingdom/Central States (Zhongguo). ⁴²

Despite the obvious politico-geographical and ideological significance of China as the ‘Middle Kingdom’ of the civilised world to the Chinese people and the reasonably regular use of the term by Chinese bureaucrats, Zhongguo (Middle Kingdom) is, to the best of my knowledge, never found translated or transliterated into a non-Chinese-based Central Asian language during the heyday of the Silk Road. Either it was not used enough by merchants who were mainly non-Chinese or its true meaning was not perceived or accepted by China’s non-Chinese-speaking neighbours, who preferred a generic term derived from the name of its once powerful ruling dynasty—Qin. The idea, though, that the Middle Kingdom was the homeland of the Han Chinese had become irrefutable, as a British business leader (and later war hero) in one of the many foreign concessions in China, P. H. Munro-Faure remarked on the Russian appreciation of the concept in the inter-war years:

Borodin appealed to the deep-seated exclusive instincts of the sons of Han, the inhabitants of a kingdom, which from time immemorial had been called the Middle Kingdom, because all other peoples [sic] exist only in outer darkness. ⁴³

Tawǧaç/Taugast and βγpwrstn

The long decline of the Han dynasty saw the rise of ethnically diverse states est­ablishing themselves on her western and northern borders. The Tuobas 拓拔 (tuòbá) (Turks?) of Särbi (Xianbei 鮮卑) lineage who founded the (Northern) Wei 魏 dynasty, which lasted from 386 to 535 CE, would give their Turkic (?) clan name to the whole of China in the form of tabγač or tauγast. Despite the name’s non-Chinese appearance, most scholars believe that it was derived from the Chinese Toba Wei 拓跋魏 (one way of referring to the Northern Wei), but how wei 魏, the Chinese dynastic title for the Tobas, became the suffix -γač/-γas(t) or vice versa is not easy to explain unless of course, it was the original ethnic name of the Tobas. ⁴⁴

One of the best known attestations of the use of tabγač as the Turkic name for the whole of China, and not just for the frontier kingdom of the Toba Wei, is found in the bilingual Kül Tigin (Que Teqin 闕特勒) monument, both in Old Turkish (in the Runic Script) and in Chinese, found in the vicinity of the old course of the Orkhon River in 1889. As a warrior prince, Kül Tigin (684–731 CE) campaigned tirelessly during his long khaganate against the Chinese and other Turkic tribes and extended the boundaries of his rule into West Central Asia. In line 4 of the Turkic version of the inscription, on the East-facing side of the stele, we find a list of major powers in which both Rome and China featured, along with mentions of ethnic groups—the Avars, Tibetans and Khitans—the last of whom, as we have already noted, are the source of another Central Asian name for China:

As mourners and lamenters (for the khagans who had passed away) there came from the east, from where the sun rises, representatives of the people of Böküli Čölüg (Korean plain), Tabγač (t ¹ b ¹ g ¹ nč, i.e., the Chinese), the Töpüt (t ² üpüt ² , i.e., Tibetans), Apar (pr ¹ , i.e., the Avars), Purum (prom, i.e., the [East] Romans), Qïrqïz (qyr ¹ k ¹ z i.e., the Kirgiz), Üč Qurïqan (i.e., the Three Quruqan—tribes who now inhabit the Baikal territory), Otuz-Tatar (i.e., the Thirty Tartars who inhabit the territory between Baikal and Mongolia), Qïtaŋ (qyt ¹ nj, i.e., the Khitans) and Tatabi (inhabitants of Mongolia)…. ⁴⁵

The people of Tabγač feature regularly in the Turkish version of the inscription as the eternal enemies and exploiters of the Turkish people, which shows unambiguously that by Tabγač the successors of Kül Tigin, who erected the memorial to him, did not mean the Sinicized Turkic dynasty of Wei but an ambitious and expansionist Tang China:

The words of the Chinese people (tabγač bodun) have always been sweet, and the materials of the Chinese people have always been soft. Deceiving by means of (their) sweet words and soft materials, the Chinese are said to cause the remote peoples to come close (to their empire) in this manner. After such a people have settled close to them, (the Chinese) are said to plan their ill will there. The Chinese do not let the real wise men and real brave men make progress. If a man commits an error, (the Chinese) do not give shelter to anybody (from his immediate family) to the families of his clan and tribe. Having been taken in by their sweet words and soft materials, you Turkish people were killed in large numbers. ⁴⁶

The Chinese version of the commemorative inscription, much briefer than the Turkish, and intended for a different audience, names Zhongguo (Middle Kingdom) only once and in a much more laudatory mode:

(Now) dating back from the time when the Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo) made her robust flight across the northern wastes…. ⁴⁷

The use of the name Tabγač in the Kül Tigin inscription might already be an anachronism in the context of the Second Türk Empire’s political propaganda vis-à-vis the Tang Empire. However, as Jonathan Skaff has pointed out, it might have been used in recognition ‘that the Tang house was Särbi in their maternal line and that many Särbi or part-Särbi continued to live in North China. Referring to Tang emperors as Tabgach Qaghans gave recognition to their sovereignty over North China, but not Mongolia’. ⁴⁸

Tabγač, in its more popular form Tauγast, was one of the few names for China that was accurately transmitted to the Eastern Roman Empire. According to the Byzantine historian Theophylactus Simoccates, the city (?) of Tauγast, which the Romans came to know through the Turks in c. 568 CE, was rich and populous and was situated between the Turks and India:

Taugast is a famous city; it is established at a distance of 1,500 miles from those called Turks. It is situated on the border of India. These bar­barians dwelling around Taugast are a most valiant and populous race, and unparalleled in size among races in the inhabited world. The remainder of the Abari on account of their defeat, turned to a much lower station in life and joined the so-called Moucri (= Turk. Böküli, i.e., Koreans). This race lives very close to Taugast and their bravery is considerable in military engagements owing to their daily practice of gymnastic exercises and the fact that they prepared psychologically for dangers…. ⁴⁹

When the Khagan of the Turks had concluded the civil war, he handled his affairs successfully and made a treaty with the men of Taugast so that, capitalizing on the profound peace on all sides, he might settle the kingdom without seditious elements. The Climatarch of Taugast is called Taisan which means ‘son of god’ in Greek speech. The kingdom of Taugast is not riven by factions; birth status provides them with the appointment of their leader. This race worships statues, but its laws are just and their way of life full of wisdom. They have a custom, which has the force of law, that males should never adorn themselves with golden ornaments although they possess a boundless supply of silver and gold on account of large-scale profitable trade. A river forms the boundary of Taugast. In former times the river divided two very considerable races who were hostile to each other; one race wore black garments, the other scarlet. In our times when Maurice was emperor of the Romans, the black-clothed race, having crossed the river, engaged in war against those clad in scarlet; then being victorious, the former took over the entire realm. The barbarians say that Alexander the Macedonian founded this city of Taugast when he reduced to slavery the Bactrians and the land of the Sogdians, destroying 120,000 barbarians. In this city the wives of the ruler have carriages made of gold, each one drawn by one steer richly adorned in gold and highly precious metal; the reins of the oxen are encrusted with gold. The man who has assumed sovereignty of Taugast spends his nights with seven hundred wives. The wives of the more important citizens of Taugast make use of silver carriages. The story is that Alexander built another city some miles away; the barbarians call it Chubdan; when the ruler dies he is mourned by the women whose heads are com­pletely shaven and are clad in black garments; and their law is that they should never leave the tomb. Chubdan is divided by two great rivers; their banks are overhung by cypresses. The nation possesses many elephants. They associate with the Indians in commercial matters. They say that those Indians reared in the north are born white-skinned. The caterpillars from which the textures of the Seroes (i.e. Seres) are woven exist in very considerable quantities among that race and possess crinkled and dappled skin; the barbarians assiduously practice the cultivation of these creatures. ⁵⁰

Chubdan (Χουβδάν), the capital of Tauγast as given in the account, is almost certainly Kumdan (-b- and -m- being readily changeable in most Altaic languages), a well-attested name for Chang’an, the western capital of Tang China, and derived from a corrupt phonetic transcription of Xianyang 咸陽, the name of the nearby ancient capital of the Qin and Han dynasties.

Tauγast, in its proper Turkish form Tavǧaç, dominates Old Turkic documents and inscriptions as the name for China and the Chinese. China was Tavǧaç or Tavǧaç yiri, the Chinese emperor was Tavǧaç xanï, his kingdom Tavǧaç el and Chinese goods Tavǧaç eḏi. The lexicographer Maḥmūd al-Kāşǧari made an interesting definition of the name:

Tavǧaç: the name of Mā Şīn, which is three months’ journey farther than Şīn. Şīn was originally three (parts): Upper in the east Tavǧaç, Middle Xıta:y and Lower Barxa:n, that is in Kāṣgar (i.e., where he wrote) but at the present time Tavǧaç is known as Mā Şīn and Xıta:y as Şīn. ⁵¹

Al-Kāşǧari, for one, knew clearly that the name Tavǧaç began life north of China’s frontier and although it was used in his time for Greater China (Mā Şīn) it did not strictly cover the non-Turkic part of the Chinese Empire (Şīn) which he called by another Turkic name to which we shall turn, viz. Xıta:y or Cathay. Tavǧaç continued to be used in the Mongol period, not so much to mean China, now called Cathay, by the Mongols, but for the Chinese language. A very interesting relic of this usage is found in the (Nestorian) Christian Syro-Turkic inscriptions from Quanzhou that I had the privilege to edit and publish with a team of scholars from Australia and Germany. The term occurs in dating formulae on Christian tombstones and is used to distinguish the Chinese (and Turkish) system of dating from the (Greek) Seleucid system still in vogue among the Christian community that once had its patriarchal seat at Seleucia-Ctesiphon in Iraq. ⁵²

However, despite its popularity among Altaic peoples in Central Asia, Tavǧaç had become completely obsolete as a foreign name for China by the Late Middle Ages. Pelliot notes that it was phonetically transliterated into Chinese as Touhuashi 桃花石, ⁵³ but as a name for China, it has been almost entirely forgotten except by historians of Central Asia. It did not even survive in Western Turkish for, in Osmanli, China was known at first as èsski-mà‘‘den (i.e., Old Mā Şīn) and later as fàghfur (<MPers. bagpwr ‘son of god’ = Chin. 天子 tianzi—cf. Armenian čen-bakour ‘Emperor of China’ and Sogdian βγpwrstn) neither of which is derived from Tavǧaç, and in Osmanli Chinese porcelain was called chinì. ⁵⁴ The identification of the Middle Kingdom with the Chinese title of its ruler tianzi is not without historical interest as it is neither a geographical nor an ethnic term and is clearly a product of diplomatic usage. It is already attested in the Sogdian version of the trilingual Karabalgasun inscription erected in the early ninth century in the capital of the First Uygur Empire. ⁵⁵ The corresponding part in the Old Turkish version of the trilingual inscription has not survived but the near contemporary Old Turkic inscription from Šine-Usu suggests tavǧaç for China and tavǧaç qanï for tianzi. The Chinese version uses the dynastic title Tang for China and introduces a rare phrase Tangshe 唐社 ‘the state (or social structure) of Tang’ as the target of rebel Shi Zhaoyi 史朝義. ⁵⁶ The term βγpwr would later be found transcribed into Syriac as in the so called Gannat Bussamē ‘Garden of delicacies’ (compiled before 1318) in which the false Messiah beguiled the Chinese (ܨܝ̈ܢܝܐ) with the worship of bgwr (ܒܓܘܪ). ⁵⁷ In modern Turkish, China is Çin (Middle Persian Čin) and the Chinese people are Çince (or Çinli = ‘Chinese person’). The legacy of Qin has now prevailed over Tavǧaç, its once popular medieval Turkic equivalent, thanks to the modern need for uniformity and instant recognition. Çin in modern Turkish is the closest phonetic derivative of the name Qin in a non-Chinese language and one that is most likely to cause offence to modern Chinese sensibility because its derivation from the title of the less than popular Qin dynasty is totally unambiguous.

India: The Other Middle Kingdom

From the fourth century CE onwards, China became much more aware of her non-Chinese neighbours to the West and South through long-distance trade across the Pamirs and the diffusion of Buddhism from India. While an official envoy sent from the imperial Chinese court to these neighbouring states could introduce himself as a representative of the then ruler of the Han and later of the Tang dynasty, Chinese Buddhist pilgrims travelling along the Silk Road to India had to make some form of ethnic self-definition for themselves, especially to rulers of kingdoms who provided them with hospitality en route to India. The travel accounts of these intrepid pilgrims are a gold mine of information for medieval names of China and also for the multifarious ways in which these Chinese monks define their nationality and ethnicity to the non-Chinese they encountered regularly. Most pilgrims did not cross into India directly through Tibet, but travelled through the Jade Gate and then took the southern route across the Tarim Basin, turning south for India before reaching Kāşǧar. They were thus frequent travellers along a major part of the Silk Road network. The great Tang pilgrim Xuanzang 玄奘 (Hsüan-tsang) (602–64 CE) even reached Samarkand before he turned south for India. The routes the pilgrims followed traversed the Kingdom of Khotan, and in Khotanese Saka the word for China is ciṇga- (ciṃgga-, ciṃga), with the adjectival form of ciṃgāna-. The Chinese language is known as ciṇgau and a Chinese lady is a Ceṃgāñā. One Khotanese Saka text says that ‘Huns, Chinese and bandits’ (huna ciṃgga supīya) are tarred with the same brush. No less an authority than the late Professor Sir Harold Bailey subscribed to the view of Pelliot that the name for China in Khotanese, along with that found in the Sogdian Ancient Letters (cynstn), in Zoroastrian writings (čēnk, čēnastān) and in Old Indic (cīna- and mahācīna-) are all derived from the dynastic title of Qin. ⁵⁸ It is very probable that the most popular name for China in Chinese Buddhist writings, Zhina, also has its origins in Khotan, given its importance as a Buddhist kingdom.

However, for a Chinese pilgrim to pronounce the Khotanese or Sanskrit form of the name as Zhi-na would imply complete ignorance of the ‘Qin’-etymology of the name Zhina. Otherwise, he would have tried to pronounce it as Zhin-a in order to preserve the ‘Qin’ element of the name, and he would also have transliterated it as Qin(-)na 秦那, unless he wanted deliberately to avoid using a dynastic title that had so many negative associations. It is worth remembering, however, that once a proper name has been phonetically transcribed into another language, the rules of pronunciation of the ‘target’ language soon come into play and alter the pronunciation significantly. For instance, English-speakers would normally pronounce Seoul as so-ul and Ukraine as uk-rain{e} and not as she-oul and u-k-ra-in-a as do speakers of Korean and Ukrainian. This is why the place-name cynʾncknd ‘China-town’ found in a Manichaean text mentioned earlier is of relevance to the transformation of Zhin(a) to Zhi-na. The intended pronun­ciation of chin-anch, could easily become chi-nanch because of the ‘syllabic weight’ of the feminine Sogdian suffix -(a)nch, thus causing the name to be pronounced chi-nanc rather than chin-anc and thereby losing the Qin component of the name once and for all.

As a term for China, Zhina is almost exclusive to Chinese Buddhist writings, as the custom of using a foreign loanword with no obvious Chinese roots for their own native land was much criticised by educated Chinese who were not Buddhists. However, it also underscores the problems posed by the lack of a commonly used term in Chinese for the Middle Kingdom in medieval times. It was most likely through reverence paid by Japanese pilgrims to Buddhist writings in Chinese that Zhina, as we have mentioned earlier, was adopted by Japan in its original Chinese characters, and became one of the most widely used names for China in the Japanese language until the end of the Second World War. Note also that the term for ‘Chinese characters’ in Japanese consists of the same characters as the term in Chinese, Hanzi 漢字, but is pronounced in the Japanese way, Kanji. Thus this bi-nom refers to Han rather than Qin.

An early Chinese pilgrim who undertook the long and potentially dangerous journey to India and who subsequently returned to China to write about his travels is the monk Faxian, mentioned above. He visited India via Khotan in the early fifth century in order to obtain a complete text of the Buddhist scripture known as the Vinaya. ⁵⁹ As already noted, Faxian was one of the few writers who still referred to his homeland as the Land of Qin (Qin tu) long after it had gone out of fashion, but he did not use Zhina as did later Chinese pilgrims. However, for the Chinese language, he preferred Hanyu to Qinyu. In contrasting the customs and dress of the Kingdom of Khotan he says:

It happened that the king of the country was then holding the pañcha parishad, that is, in Chinese (Hanyu 漢語), the great quinquennial assembly. …

To the east of these hills the dress of the common people is of coarse materials, as in our country of Qin (Qin tu), but here also there were among them the differences of fine woollen cloth and serge or haircloth. ⁶⁰

The reason why Faxian used the now anachronistic name for China was that he could not use the more obvious name, viz. Zhongguo ‘the Middle Kingdom’, within the Indian sphere of influence without offending his hosts. The Chinese claim that their native land was ‘the Middle Kingdom’ would not have gone down well with Indian princes and sages who also saw themselves as dwellers at the centre of the known world.

Faxian explained clearly in the account of his travels that by ‘Middle Kingdom’ (zhongguo) he did not mean China but Central India:

After crossing the river, (the travellers) immediately came to the kingdom of Wuchang 烏萇 (Wu-chang, which is indeed part) of North India. The people all use the language of Central India 天竺 (Tianzhu/Ti’en-chu), ‘Central India’ being what we should call the ‘Middle Kingdom (zhongguo)’. The food and clothes of the common people are the same as in that Central Kingdom. The Law of Buddha is very (flourishing in Wuchang). ⁶¹

Faxian and his followers were deferential to the extreme in reserving the epithet Middle Kingdom in their travel writing for India, especially when the high quality of monastic life in the land of Buddhism’s origin was compared to that of the less well trained and ill-disciplined monks in China:

In consequence of this success in his quest (for scriptures) Faxian stayed here (Patna) for three years, learning Sanskrit books and the Sanskrit speech, and writing out the Vinaya rules. When Dao Zheng 道整 (Tao-ching) (another Buddhist master from China) arrived in the Central Kingdom (zhongguo) and saw the rules observed by the Śramanas, and the dignified demeanour in their societies which he remarked under all occurring circumstances, he sadly called to mind in what a mutilated and imperfect condition the rules were among the monkish communities in the land of Qin (i.e., China), and made the following aspiration—‘From this time forth till I come to the state of Buddha, let me not be born in a frontier land’. ⁶²

The claim for India to be the Central Kingdom is strongly defended in a Buddhist chronicle known as the Shi jia fangzhi 釋迦方志 compiled by the monk Dao Xuan 道宣 in c. 650. Though the compiler was Chinese, the sources he used for the accounts of Western polities appear to have been drawn from works by Indian writers or Chinese monks who had spent some time in India. For ‘Chinese’ he used the dynastic title of Tang. The Chinese language therefore was Tangyan 唐言, ⁶³ which shows that by that time the Tang dynasty had become so established that its dynastic title, like that of the Han, could be used generally to indicate res Sinicae.

Dao Xuan’s admiration for India as the homeland of Buddhism knew no bounds and he was one of the first writers in Chinese to properly concede the title of Central or Middle Kingdom (zhongguo) to the part of India in which the Buddha was born. This he believed could be justified for five reasons: its name, its extent, its climate, its waters and its population. ⁶⁴ He then cites a very practical demonstration to prove his point that India and not China is geographically the Middle Earth:

(First:) To speak of the name: All speak of the Western country as zhongguo—the Middle Country (Madhyadeśa). It is also called the country of Central India. The wise people of our country have also discussed and pointed to the Western country (i.e., India) as zhongguo (‘Middle Country’). If it is not the middle why do the laymen as well as the sages, all, call it middle? Previously under the (Former) Song (Sung) dynasty (420–79 CE), there was a man named He Chengtian (Ho Ch’eng-t’ien) 何承天 of Donghai (T’ung-hai) 東海 district who was learned in everything and reputed as the foremost scholar of his times. He once asked the Shamen 沙門 (śramana, i.e., the monk) Huiyan (Hui-yen) 慧嚴: What calendar is used in Buddha’s country so that it is called the Middle (country)? Huiyan answered: ‘In India during the summer solstice, when the sun is at the meridian, there is no shadow. So it is described as in the middle of heaven and the earth. While in the middle province of this country there is still some shadow on that same occasion. So our calendar has suffered changes during the three ancient dynasties and there are differ­ences in months as well as leap years and mistakes are often done in calculation. Thus it is clear that we are not in the middle. He Chengtian, could not reply. ⁶⁵

Dao Xuan also draws attention to Zhendan 振旦 (Chen-tan) as the name for China which, as he (or the commentator) explains, is also known as Shenzhou 神州, lit. ‘Region of the Spirits’. ⁶⁶ Zhendan is seen by many scholars as the phonetic transcription for the Pali Cīnasthāna—one of the most popular names for China in Indic languages—and as it occurs in Hindu texts before the rise of the Qin dynasty, its antiquity could be used to argue against the view that ‘Chin’ in the word China is derived from the Qin dynasty. Pelliot, however, argued strongly that Cīnasthāna was derived from Sogdian Zin(i)stan and the term Cīnasthāna occurs only in Indian literature of the post-, not the pre-Qin era. ⁶⁷

Two centuries after Faxian, another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Zhang Wenming 張文明, better known to posterity by his Buddhist name Yijing 義淨 (I-Tsing), made a very long journey lasting almost 25 years (671–95 CE) to India and some of the islands of Indonesia in search of scriptures and to study Buddhist monastic practices. Like Faxian, he wrote an account of his travels that is a treasure-trove for names that Buddhist monks used for China, names that are both respectful to their Indian hosts and not offensive to the Chinese readers of their accounts. As Yijing was extremely interested in comparing Indian and Chinese customs, it was impossible for him not to use names for China and for res Sinicae. Among the many names he used for China are Dong Hua, Shentu and Zhina. Dong Hua 東華 (lit. ‘Eastern Prosperity’) is an adaptation of the ancient name Hua Xia, ⁶⁸ and the designation of ‘Eastern’ is needed to contrast with India, the Land of the West. Shentu (lit. ‘Land of the Immortals’) or Shenzhou (‘province of the Immortals’) is a Camelot-or Avalon-type mystical name for China used almost exclusively by Chinese Buddhist writers. Tang, the title of the reigning dynasty, was of course also used, as Da Tang 大唐 ‘Great Tang’, in the title of Xuanzang’s travel account, discussed further below. The term was not phonetically transcribed into Indic languages, as it was into Old Turkish, as to or taito (v. supra). The term Zhina on the other hand required some explanation for Yijing’s Chinese readers, and in an explanatory note, written probably by one of his immediate disciples, we possess an important statement both on the names and epithets of India and China:

Note 3. To tell a teacher of one’s own doings, &c., mentioned above, is the custom which is taught in the Ârya-desa 阿離耶提舍; Ârya meaning ‘noble’, desa ‘region’, the Noble Region, a name for the West. It is so called because men of noble character appear there successively, and people all praise the land by that name. It is also called Madhya-desa 未睇是中提捨是國, i.e., Middle Land, for it is the centre of a hundred myriads of countries. The people are all familiar with this name. The northern tribes (hu 胡 = Mongols or Turks) alone call the Noble Land ‘Hindu’ 許伊 (反), but this is not at all a common name. It is only a vernacular name, and has no special significance. The people of India (西國 xiguo, lit. ‘Western Nation’) do not often know this designation, and the most suitable name for India is the ‘Noble Land’ (聖方 shengfeng).

Some say that Indu means the moon, and the Chinese name for India, i.e., Indu 印度, is derived from it; although it may mean this, it is, nevertheless, not the common name. As to the Indian name for the Great Tang 大唐 (Da Tang), viz. Zhina, it is only a name and has no special meaning. ⁶⁹

The commentator or editor clearly knew that Zhina, though a widely used name for China in Buddhist circles, could not easily be explained etymologically to a Chinese audience, and certainly he did not realise that it might have been related to Qin. As mentioned above, once the name Zhin-a as it appeared in Buddhist texts in Sanskrit or Khotanese was pronounced Zhi-na, the Qin-root was immediately lost, hence the commentator’s rather glib comment that ‘it (Zhina) is only a name and has no special meaning’.

Xuanzang was arguably the most famous of all medieval Chinese Buddhist pil­grims to India. The account of his travels, which he wrote on his return from his seventeen-year journey to India (629–45 CE), was submitted to the Tang court in 646 as the Da Tang Xiyuji 大唐西域記 (An Account of the Western Regions [composed] in the Great Tang Era). One of his disciples, Huili 慧立, composed a full biography of this famous Buddhist saint (Da Tang Da Ci’ensi Sanzang Fashi zhuan大唐大慈恩寺三藏法師傳) using Xuanzang’s work as his source and rewriting some of the sections for the Chinese audience; it was published after Xuanzang’s death in 664 CE. In 688 the monk Yancong 彥悰 added more chapters to the biography to include an account of Xuanzang’s life after his return from India. In these two works, Xuanzang was addressed by a variety of names. One would expect that Xuanzang would always refer to himself as the ‘Tang Monk’ (Tangseng 唐僧) or the ‘Monk from Great Tang’ (Da Tangseng 大唐僧) (i.e., Tang = China). But in the presence of Indian dignitaries he would occasionally refer to himself deferentially as Zhina guo seng 支那國僧 ‘a monk from the country of Zhina’, assuming that the non-Chinese people with whom he discoursed were not familiar with the practice of calling his native country after its ruling dynasty. ⁷⁰ Like earlier pilgrims, Xuanzang and his disciples were respectful to India for being the land of the Buddha’s birth, and showed no disquiet in listening to criticisms of China/Zhina as an unenlightened land. According to a passage in the later Biography, not found in Xuanzang’s own earlier Account, when Xuanzang was wondering whether he should return to China after he had stayed for some time in India, he recorded this conversation with a group of Buddhist Indian sages:

All the priests hearing of it (i.e., Xuanzang’s desire to return to China) came to him in a body and begged him to remain, saying: ‘India is the place of Buddha’s birth. The Great Saint, although he has passed away, has yet left behind him many traces (of his presence); what greater happiness in life than to visit, and adore and exalt these (relics)? Why then do you leave these, after having come so far? Moreover, China (Zhinaguo 支那國) is a country of Mlecćhas, i.e., men of no importance, and shallow as to religion, and so Buddhas are never born there. The mind (of the people) is narrow, and their coarseness is profound, hence neither saints nor sages go there from this country; the coolness of the climate, and the ruggedness of the country—these circumstances, are also enough to cause you to think’. ⁷¹

Xuanzang decided to stay in India for a while longer and in due course he was asked a seemingly contemporary but profoundly ‘Sinological’ question at Nalanda by the Indian sage-king Śīlāditya-vājra concerning the identity of a certain ‘Prince of Qin’ (秦王 qinwang) of ‘Zhina’ (i.e., China). This is one of the most relevant accounts to our inquiry as it concerns a dialogue (probably partly imaginary) devoted to a near contemporary event in China. The story is told slightly differently in the earlier Account and in the later Biography, and the differences are significant. The question according to the Account reads:

The king, Śīlāditya, after [Xuanzang] had recovered from the fatigue of his journey, said, ‘From what country do you come, and what do you seek in your travels?’ He said in reply, ‘I come from the great Tang country, and I ask permission to seek for the law (religious books) of Buddha’. The king said, ‘Whereabouts is the great Tang country? by what road do you travel? and is it far from this, or near?’ In reply he said, ‘My country lies to the north-east from this several myriads of li. It is the kingdom which in India is called Mahachina’. The king answered, ‘I have heard that the country of Mahachina has a king called Qin (Ts’in), the son of heaven, when young distinguished for his spiritual abilities, when old then (called) divine warrior’. The empire in former generations was in disorder and confusion, every where divided and in disunion; soldiers were in conflict, and all the people were afflicted with calamity. Then the prince of Qin (Ts’in), son of heaven, who had conceived vast purposes from the first, brought into exercise all his pity and love; he brought about a right understanding, and pacified and settled all within the seas. His laws and instruction spread on every side. People from other countries brought under his influence declared themselves ready to submit to his rule. The multitude whom he nourished generously sang in their songs of the prowess of the king of Qin (Ts’in). I have learned long since his praises were sung thus in verse. Are the records (laudatory hymns) of his great (complete) qualities well founded? Is this the king of the great Tang, of which you speak?’ ⁷²

The Biography gives a much-abridged version of the Indian king’s question:

Again the king asked as follows: ‘The Master comes from China (Zhina); your disciple (i.e., the king speaking of himself) has heard that that country has a king of Qin, whose name is celebrated in songs and airs set for dancing and music; I never yet knew who this king was, or what his great merit was, that led to this distinction’. ⁷³

In the Account version, Xuanzang introduced himself by his preferred Chinese title as ‘Monk from the Great Tang (state)’ but in doing so he had to explain to Śīlāditya-vājra that ‘Great Tang (Da Tang)’ is a distant country to the northeast and that in Indian languages it is known as Mahachina. The phrase translated by Beal as the ‘king of Ts’in (Qin), whose name is celebrated in songs and airs set for dancing and music’ is, at first sight, a reference to the First Emperor of Qin (Shi Huangdi), as Beal himself duly noted in his translation. ⁷⁴ In fact it is now known to be a reference to the then ruling Emperor Tang Taizong 唐太宗 (r. 626–49 CE; born in 598 CE as Li Shimin 李世民), one of the most enlightened and bene­volent of all Chinese emperors. His father, the founding emperor of the Tang dynasty, granted him the principality of Qin, which coincided roughly with the territory of the ancient state of Qin before the unification of China under the First Emperor. In 620 CE, Li Shimin as Prince of Qin helped to put down a rebellion against his father after a hard-fought campaign. At one point the prince lifted the spirits of the troops who had remained loyal to the Tang government with special martial music that he composed, which later became known as the ‘tunes which broke the enemy lines’ (破陣樂 pozhenle). After he became emperor, he collected together the various pieces of martial music that he had composed and personally turned it into a ‘song-and-dance’ sequence known as ‘(enemy) line-breaking dance’ (破陣舞 pozhenwu), which won instant popular success. Because of its patriotic fervour and triumphant mood, the pozhenwu was often performed in front of visiting dignitaries. ⁷⁵ The phrase translated (or paraphrased) by Beal as ‘king of Qin, whose name is celebrated in songs and airs set for dancing and music’ should therefore read: ‘the tune of the Prince of Qin’s (enemy)- line-breaking dance-music’. Before the days of mass media and the instant transcultural diffusion of ‘pop-music’, this would have been an extraordinary question to be posed by an Indian, albeit a sage, to a visitor from China, who would also have conducted his conversation with Xuanzang in an Indic language. In his reply, Xuanzang was able to eulogise on the current state of prosperity in his native land under the rule of this erstwhile Prince of Qin. Again the two versions differ significantly in his answer. The earlier Account has the following:

Replying, he said, ‘China is the country of our former kings, but the ‘great Tang’ is the country of our present ruler. Our king in former times, before he became hereditary heir to the throne (i.e., before the empire was established), was called the sovereign of Ts’in (Qin), but now he is called the ‘king of heaven’ (emperor). At the end of the former dynasty the people had no ruler, civil war raged on all sides and caused confusion, the people were destroyed, when the Prince of Ts’in, by his supernatural gifts, exercised his love and compassion on every hand; by his power the wicked were destroyed on every side, the eight regions found rest, and the ten thousand kingdoms paid tribute. He cherished creatures of every kind, and submitted with respect to the three precious ones. He mitigated punishment, so that the country abounded in resources and the people enjoyed complete rest. It would be difficult to recount all the great changes he accomplished’.

Śīlāditya-vājra replied, ‘Very excellent indeed! the people are happy in the hands of a holy king’. ⁷⁶

The editor of the Biography probably realised that a Chinese readership would require additional material on the identity of the Prince of Qin, Xuanzang’s reply in the later version is therefore much fuller:

The Master of the Law (i.e., Xuanzang) said: ‘In my country when there is a man observable for the quality of protecting the good, capable of diverting evil from the people, and able to nourish and cherish all living things with fostering care—then they sound his praise in songs and chants arranged to music, in the first place, for the ancestral temple; and then for the use of the distant village folk. The Prince of Qin is the same, now, as the reigning Emperor of China—but before the highest authority of the Emperor (i.e., Taizong) was established, he was but invested as the prince of Qin. This was a period of disorder in heaven and earth; the people had no ruler, the fields and plains were covered with the bodies of men, the streams and valleys were full of their blood; during the night, ill-omened stars shed their pestilent light, vapours rose with the day, the three rivers were infested by voracious toll-collectors, and the four seas were afflicted with the poison of monstrous snakes.

The Prince, as the next of kin to the supreme ruler, obedient to the call of Heaven, filled with noble ardour, rallied his troops, put down the oppressors (male and female) by force; seizing the battle-axe and the lance, he quickly calmed the sea, the villagers were proudly quiet, and the districts restored to order as before. The sun and moon and stars shone out again, and the world was filled with gratitude for his care. For this reason we sing his praises’.

The king said: ‘Such a man is one sent by heaven to be the Lord of the world’. ⁷⁷

It is not impossible that Xuanzang was actually asked a question about the more famous First Emperor whom many outside China would have still assumed was the Qin Emperor of the state of Zhina. Such an association would have shown some kind of mental link still between Qin and Zhina. However, in his biography, Xuanzang, or his disciple-editor, used the happy coincidence that the esteemed emperor of China of his day once held the title of Prince of Qin to give himself ‘royal’ credentials which he sorely lacked as a lowly pilgrim-monk.

We are fortunate to possess a partial but near contemp­orary Uygur translation of the biography of Xuanzang. How the various terms for China were translated from Chinese into a contemporary foreign language is of great relevance to our investigation. The surviving portions of this translation have preserved at least three designations for ‘China’ and it is instructive to look at the Chinese origin of these three titles:

taito is a phonetic transcription of the popular form of the dynastic title Da Tang. ⁷⁸ This is one of the few instances other than Qin in which a dynastic title has been adopted in a foreign (i.e., non-Chinese) language for the Middle Kingdom.

uluγ tawγač (Great Taugast) is used to render Zhinaguo ‘the state of China’ in Xuanzang’s epithet: ‘the śramana from the state of Zhina’ (Xuanzang Zhinaguo seng 玄奘支那國僧) even though the Chinese text in front of the translator would have read Zhinaguo 支那國. ⁷⁹

mxa cinadiš (>Skt. maha cinadeša) is used as an alternative translation of Zhinaguo. ⁸⁰ This is more to be expected as zhina and cinadeša are clearly linguistically related to Qin (Ch’in) but the relation might not have been obvious to the translator. Interestingly when faced with the epithet Prince of Qin (Qin huang 秦皇), that is, Li Shimin, the Uygur translator gives tsyn wʾnk and tsyn coo (= Chin. qingong 秦公?) and what is worth noting is that he had phonetically transcribed qin as TSYN (similar to that in the modern but now outdated Ts’in in the Wade-Giles system of romanisation) and not as CYN as in the recently published Sogdian letter mentioned above.

In the obituary part of the Biography, the translator, when faced with the statement that ‘in wisdom and eloquence’ Xuanzang was ‘always peerless (lit. ‘number one’) in both India (Shanbu zhou 贍部洲 [Skt. Jambūdvīpa]) and China (Zhina)’, ⁸¹ the Uygur translator had to add tawγač to mxa cinadiš to make sure that his Turkic readers knew that China was meant. ⁸²

As the Biography was intended for a Chinese readership, the translator would inevitably have to find ways of dealing with dynastic terms. The ancient dynasty of Xia 夏 was simply translated as tawγač, and so occasionally is Tang 唐. ⁸³ The dynastic title Han occurs with the royal title Han Ming Wang 漢明王 (Han Mingdi 帝)—the Chinese Emperor (r. 29–75 CE) whose legendary dream led the quest of Buddhism into Central Asia. This royal title was always phonetically transcribed as xanmi xan (xʾnmi xʾn) irrespective of whether the Chinese gives Han Ming Wang or Han Zhu 漢主 (Han ruler). ⁸⁴ The fact that Han 漢 would appear in transcription spelt exactly the same as xan ‘king’ in Turkish means the transcription xan for Han is sparingly used. With the widely used character hua 華, the translator seems to have encountered an insoluble problem. Hua is not only used occasionally to mean China and the Chinese as well as prosperity, it is also part of the name of Xuanzang’s monastery in Chang’an, the Yuhuasi 玉華寺 (lit. ‘the Jade prosperous monastery’). The translator simply phonetically transcribed all occurrences of the character hua as xua (xwʾ) irrespective of usage. ⁸⁵

Names for China in the Xi’an (Nestorian) Monument (781 CE)

Erected in Chang’an in 781 CE, the famous, or some would say infamous, and certainly over-studied, bilingual (Chinese and Syriac) Xi’an Monument (or Monumentum Sinicum) eulogising the diffusion of Christianity in Tang China, is an absolute treasure-trove for names of China, both indigenous and foreign. At least four different names are used for China in the main part of the inscribed text in Chinese; another is in Sogdian (written in Syriac script) and a further one is in Syriac in the title and colophon. The name in Sogdian, Zin(i)stan (ܨܝܢܤܬܐܢ ṣynstʾn), spelt almost identically to the form attested in the Sogdian Ancient Letters, is found at the very beginning of the text as part of the title of the priest (pʾpšy <Chin. fashi 法師 [EMC puap-srij]) Adam:

ܐܕܐܡ ܩܫܝܫܐ ܘܟܘܪܐܦܝܤܩܘܦܐ ܘܦܐܦܫܝ ܕܨܝܢܤܬܐܢ ʾdʾm qšyšʾ wkwrʾpysqwpʾ wpʾpšy dṣynstʾn ‘Adam Priest and Chorepiscopos and Fapshi (priest) of Zin(i)stan’. ⁸⁶

Zin(i)stan is later given as the name for (Western) China in the important Persian geographical treatise, the Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, in the form of ‘Chīnstān/Chīnistān. ⁸⁷

The Syriac name for China (ܨܝ̈ܢܝܐ ṣÿnyʾ) is found in the colophon at the bottom of the inscription on the Monumentum:

ܕܟܬܝ̈ܒܢ ܒܗ ܡܕܒܪܢܘܬܐܗ ܕܦܪܘܩܢ ܘܟܪܘܙܘܬܗܘܢ ܕܐܒ̈ܗܝܢ ܕܠܘܬ ܡ̈ܠܟܐ ܕܨܝ̈ܢܝܐ dktÿbn bh mdbrnwth dprwqn wqrwzwthwn d’b̈hyn dlwt m̈lkʾ dṣÿnyʾ ‘The things which are written on it [are] the law of him (who is) our Saviour and the preaching of them (who are) our fathers to the kings of (i.e., China)’. ⁸⁸

The same Syriac name for China, (Beth) Zïniya, is also found in other Christian texts in Syriac. ⁸⁹ The fact that it is used together with the Sogdian in the same inscription and written in the same Syriac script is highly significant, and underscores the bilingualism (Sogdian and Syriac) of the foreign Christian community in Tang China.

The four (and possibly five) different names for China in the Chinese section of the Monumentum illustrate all the problems of Chinese political self-definition within Chinese cultural, political and historical contexts. The name Zhongguo ‘Middle Kingdom’ is found near the character Qin 秦 on the capstone which sat above the inscribed stele, and also in the title of the eulogy, except that the term Qin is not used for the detested Qin dynasty but for the Roman Empire (Da Qin, lit. ‘Great[er] Qin’)—the land of Christianity’s origin: Da Qin Jingjiao liuxing Zhongguo bei 大秦景教流行中國碑 ‘Stele (com­memorating) the diffusion of the Da Qin (i.e., Roman) Luminous Religion in the Middle Kingdom (China)’. ⁹⁰ There is little doubt, though, that the character ‘Qin’ in Da Qin signified China, and that the phrase was intended to be understood as a back-handed compliment or a reciprocal term of respect for the Romans. ⁹¹ As the section on Da Qin in the Chronicle of the Later Han Dynasty (Hou Hanshu) says: ‘They (the Romans) resemble the Chinese (lit. ‘people of the Middle Kingdom’), and that is why the country is called Da Qin (i.e., Great Qin/Great[er] China)’. ⁹²

The use of the term Zhongguo in the title for China may seem unusual in that the most respectful way of referring to China at the height of the Tang dynasty would have been to use the dynastic title of Tang or Da Tang, ‘Great Tang’. The Japanese monk Ennin 圓仁 (Chin. Yuanren), who visited China in the Late Tang period entitled his famous travelogue Nittō guhō junreikōki 入唐求法巡禮行記 (Chin. Ru Tang qiufa xunli xingji) (The Record of a Pilgrimage to Tang [China] in Search of the Law). The term Da Tang was used in the Monu­mentum only for the purpose of dating the erection of the stele, ⁹³ because there were strict rules and protocols governing the use of the full dynastic title in official documents. Nevertheless the character Tang was used twice in a dynastic sense in the main (Chinese) part of the Monumentum to indicate China. One of them, Ju Tang 巨唐 (lit. ‘Grand/Great Tang), is a rare but deliberately contrived alternative. ⁹⁴ The other term, Wo Tang 我唐 (lit. ‘Our Tang [dynasty]’), is an over-familiar royal term used perhaps by the priest Adam, the author of the inscription, to stress the fact that the new religion (i.e., Christianity) saw itself as rightfully belonging to the Tang state. ⁹⁵ The term Zhongguo had already become established as a designation for all the territory east of what remained of the Second Türk Empire. Skaff has drawn our attention to an insightful remark made by the Chinese Emperor Tang Taizong concerning Liang Shidu 梁師都—a local warlord who had subordinated himself to a Türk qaghan and supported Türk rule over China. Taizong referred to Liang as ‘an inhabitant of the Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo ren 中國人) who stole my territory and committed atrocities against my people’. Thus, to Taizong, Liang was ethnically and culturally ‘Chinese’ despite his allegiance to the Turks and despite having adopted Türk titles in his titulature. ⁹⁶

What perplexes me is the fact that the term Zhongguo was used only in the capstone of the Monumentum and in the title-line of the inscribed text and never again in the remaining 30+ long lines of the Chinese main text inscribed on the stele. The term zhongtu 中土, lit. ‘Middle Earth’, found in line 28, is clearly an equivalent and contains probably the same geopolitical nuances: viz. the land which the (Han) Chinese had ruled by right since the mythical dynasties. ⁹⁷ One of the most important of these semi-mythical dynasties is the Xia 夏 (c. 2070–c. 1600 BCE) during which the Chinese language became more fully developed along with her many traditional customs and social regulations. The character xia 夏also means ‘summer’, and to avoid confusion the Chinese adopted the bi-nom Huaxia華夏 as a proper name for the territory occupied by the Xia and her dynastic successors. Hua 華is used synonymously with the word hua 花 ‘flower’ and therefore has the wider meaning of ‘blooming, luxuriant and prosperous’. Huaxia is popularly used in Classical Chinese texts for the Middle Kingdom, and hua 華 is still found in the modern official name for China, viz. Zhonghua 中華. Huaren 華人 is also widely used among overseas Chinese to mean Han Chinese both living in China and abroad. Although Huaxia is not found in the main (i.e., Chinese) text of the Monumentum, the term Zhongxia 中夏 ‘Middle Xia’ ⁹⁸ is used for China, and Xia also features in the less common form of Qu Xia 區夏, lit. ‘the Xia (occupied) Region’. ⁹⁹ One intriguing use of the character 華 hua is found on line 10 of the Chinese main text of the Monumentum:

guanghua qiyun 光華啟運 ‘(Taizong) inaugurated his (imperial) fortune in splendour and magni­ficence’ ¹⁰⁰

Here, the character 華hua in the term guanghua 光華 (lit. ‘radiant and prosperous’) could be an abridge­­ment of 華夏 Huaxia (v. supra) and John Foster, one of the better known trans­lators of the Monumentum Sinicum, believes the phrase should be translated as ‘(Taizong) who enlightened China and started a new era…’. ¹⁰¹ Interestingly, according to Havret, author of a three-volume work on the Monumentum, the use of the term Zhonghua 中華 to signify the whole of China is attested in the title of the inscription on the medieval (Islamic) mosque in Xi’an. The term was used to distinguish China from the Western Regions where Islam had already achieved considerable missionary success. ¹⁰² For this culturally significant name for China not to be used by the Christian priests in the Tang is worth noting. The use of the more politically nuanced term Zhongguo at the very beginning of the Monumentum might, of course, have been influenced by the fact that it was already employed by imperial bureaucrats in the wording of the imperial proclamation of 638 CE legalising the diffusion of the religion in the Tang Empire. ¹⁰³

With the exception of Tang and Da Tang, which are phonetically transcribed as to and taito respectively in Old Turkish and used mainly for dating purposes, all the other names for China involving Zhong, Hua or Xia which appear on the Monumentum are rarely found transcribed or translated into Central Asian languages. They require a knowledge of Chinese culture that was not necessary for traders or monks like those who composed the inscription. The two names for China in foreign languages on the same stele are clearly derived from Qin and demonstrate the continuing dominance of the Qin onomastic legacy. That Qin was also a dynastic and not an ethnic title needs to be stressed. It is tantamount to our retrospectively naming the Romans of the High Empire Julians, Claudians or Flavians. If, on the other hand, the entire inscribed text on the Monumentum, encompassing both the Chinese and the Syriac parts, was the work of Adam who was known to be a skilled translator of Buddhist and ‘Messiah’ (i.e., Christian) writings, ¹⁰⁴ the level of Chinese cultural sensitivity and literary skill acquired by him as a foreign monk was high indeed and deserves our admiration.

Khitai—Kataia—Cathay

The long period of decline of Tang rule brought new peoples and ruling houses to the Northern borders of China. The Khitans (Chin. qidan 契丹), who were already a major political and military power on the northeastern frontier of China, began to expand their territory and established the Liao 遼 dynasty (907–1125 CE). Following the conquest of the Liao by the Jurchens, many Khitans migrated to the West under Yelü Dashi 耶律達實 (r. 1124–43). They came to be called the Kara-Khitai, lit. ‘Black Khitans’. The fact that the Khitans had lived both to the East and West of the early Mongol Empire, and had control of significant parts of neighbouring China, meant that the name under which they were designated came to be the name for North China used by nations who communicated with China by land.

Use of the name Kïtay to represent China already appears in the Turkish Manichaean text MIK III 198 in Uygur script before the tenth century CE. The name is found in lines in black added to the original text written in a variety of colours of ink:

I, Yapgun (or Vapxua), an Auditor with faith in the two palaces of light, have ventured to recite this remedy (for the soul) twice since coming from Cathay. Whoever recites it after me, may they be so kind as to name me! Because these five burdens (?) are com­pleted, I renounce sin. [Forgive] my sins! ¹⁰⁵

According to Pelliot, the earliest Western mention of the name Catai which he could trace is the ‘Chata’ of the document describing the Mongol campaign against the Muslims which was translated from Arabic into Latin at Damietta (Egypt) in 1221. ¹⁰⁶ The Franciscan William of Rubruck (Willem van Ruysbroeck in his native Flemish) (c. 1220–c. 1293), who travelled through the Mongol Empire in 1253–55, encountered Cathayans at Caracorum (Karakorum) whom he immediately and correctly identified as the Seres of the Classical sources:

Further on is Great Cataia, whose people, I understand, were known in ancient times as the Seres. They were the source of the finest silk cloth, which is named seric after the people, and they in turn are known as the Seres after one of their towns. I am reliably informed that the region contains a city which has walls of silver and battlements of gold. The country consists of numerous provinces, of which a good many are still not subject to the Mo’als (i.e., Mongols). Between them and India lies the sea.

The Cataians are a small race, who when speaking breathe heavily through the nose; and it is a general rule that all orientals have small openings for the eyes. They are excellent craftsmen in whatever skill, and their physicians are very well versed in the efficacy of herbs and can diagnose very shrewdly from the pulse. But they do not employ urine samples, not knowing anything about urine: this I saw [for myself], since there are a number of them at Caracorum. Their custom has always been that whatever the father’s craft all his sons are obliged to follow it. This is why they yield such a heavy tribute: they furnish the Mo’als daily with one thousand five hundred iascot (an iascot is an ingot of silver weighing ten marks, making a daily total of fifteen thousand marks), not counting the silk cloth and foodstuffs they draw from the country and other services they are rendered. ¹⁰⁷

According to the Greek sources known to me, the first time China was called the land of the Chataia/Khitans (Χαταΐα) was in the encyclopedic historical work, the Ἀποδείξεις Ἱστοριῶν (Proofs of Histories, Lat. Historiae Demons­trationes), of the last major historian of Athens, Laonikos Chalkokondylas (c. 1430–c. 1470). In it both forms for China, that is, Sinēs and Chataia, are encountered:

The King of the Indians is this man who has the name of the nine kings, King Chaghatai. It is said that he became the king of the nine kings after sending a large army because of the Massagetae against Timur. He went to the Araxēs and crossed it and after subduing most of the land there, withdrew and came home again. He is the king of Sinēs (i.e., China) ¹⁰⁸ and of all India and his land extends as far as the Taprobanē Island (Sri Lanka), to the Indian sea, into which the greatest rivers in the land of India empty themselves—the Ganges, the Indus, the Akesinēs, the Hydaspēs, the Hydraotēs and the Hyphasis—these being the greatest rivers in the land. The land of India provides many goods and much wealth, as does the King of the whole land, which is under his sway. He himself, setting out from the land above the Ganges and the coast of India and Taprobanē (Sri Lanka), went against the King of Khataia, the land inside the Ganges and the Indus. He overthrew its land and made this city his capital. Then it transpired that the whole of the land of India was under one king. These people reverence the gods who manage the land of Khataia—Apollo, Artemis and especially Hera. They do not all speak the same language among themselves, but good governance is given to the many distinct races, to most of the people in their cities and villages. ¹⁰⁹

By the time the Italian travellers and sojourners like Marco Polo and Odoric Poderone, and the Franciscan missionaries led by John of Montecorvino reached China proper, Cathay was the name for China proper, as it was used almost exclusively in their writings. Marco Polo in fact only used Cin once for the China Sea. ¹¹⁰ The etymological link between Cathay and the Khitans is so uncontroversial that for the name Cathay, the Oxford English Dictionary can afford to be both concise and direct:

Cathay: arch. or poet. Also formerly Cathaye, || Cataya. Cathia [ad. med. and Renaissance L. Cat(h)aya, ad. Turkic Khitā: cf. Kazan Tartar Kytai, Russ. Kitay China.] = China.

Refs. A. Jenckynson in S.P. Dom. Eliz. XXXVI, lx. f. 134.

 Cathayan earliest reference Milton, Paradise Lost X 293.

The entry in Hobson-Jobson is also much less problematic than that on ‘China’:

Cathay: n.p. China; originally Northern China. The origin of the name is given in the quotation below from the Introduction to Marco Polo. In the 16th century, and even later, from a misunderstanding of the medieval travellers, Cathay was supposed to be a country north of China, and is so represented in many maps. Its identity with China was fully recognised by P. Martin Martini in his Atlas Sinensis; also by Valentijn, iv. China, 2.

Besides being the origin of the Russian name for China, Cathay had long been the Mongolian name for her Han-neighbour (Khyatad uls Хятад улс). As Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, Kitay is the only permitted name for China which is not derived from ‘Middle Kingdom’.

Despite its apparent popularity, it was Qin and not Cathay that in the end won the competition for the official ‘Western’ name for China, except for Russians, Mongols and Uzbeks. Forms of the name derived from Qin, especially Čin, Mačīn and Mahācīna remained dominant at the time of the European Age of Discovery when maritime contact took over from the more laborious and insecure land-routes. The last form of the name is of particular importance as Pelliot explains:

When towards the 1500s, the Portuguese came to hear of China, they correctly transcribed as ‘China’, in Portuguese spelling, the form ‘Čina’ used by the Malays. This Portuguese spelling has been retained in English {and in German}, but pronounced in ways that are no longer true to the original. ¹¹¹

The name Cathay found a new life in nostalgia, and curiously in the revival of national sentiment. It was much used by companies that traded with China to avoid the more demeaning name associated with the disadvantages inflicted by European colonial powers on the ‘Chinaman’. The most celebrated use must be that of Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong’s successful international airline. Legend has it that the term ‘Cathay’ was chosen at the time of the airline’s founding deliberately to avoid the name ‘China’. Its Chinese phonetic equivalent and calque 國泰 guotai (Cantonese kwoktai) meaning a ‘prosperous nation’ was already used by trading companies and hotels. Its prominence as the Chinese name of Hong Kong’s flag-carrier means that the average Chinese person in Hong Kong if asked about the origin of the term ‘Cathay’, would most likely reply, after much deliberation, that it is derived from the popular goodwill wish and commercial term kwoktai—that is, ‘a prosperous nation’.