China

The graph-pair 中國 (Zhōngguó) is first attested on the He zun, a Western Zhou ritual bronze of about 1038 BCE, in the phrase zhái zī zhōng guó, “dwell in this central region,” where it denotes the royal domain at the center of the early Zhou world rather than a country. Across the Zhou and into the Han the term widened in stages: from the central capital region, to the cluster of Central Plains states that shared the ritual order of the Hua-Xia, and at last to the whole realm set against the peoples of the four directions. It is built transparently from zhōng (中), “center, middle,” and guó (國), “state, walled domain,” and it is the name modern Chinese still uses for the country.

Zhōngguó is not a geographer’s coordinate but a claim about the center of the world. Where the outside names on this page record the road by which a traveler arrived, naming China for its silk or for the Qín dynasty, the Middle Kingdom is middle cosmologically: the civilized center around which the rest is arranged as periphery. It is the one name here drawn from China’s own political self-conception, and the contrast with Huáxià beside it is exact, the two halves of a self-understanding that the Persia page sets out in the same way with Pārsa and Ērān. The realm names itself by its position at the center; everyone else names it by the direction from which they came.

Huáxià (華夏) joins huá (華), “florescent, flourishing,” with xià (夏), the name of the legendary first dynasty and of the people of the central plain. It is attested in the Eastern Zhou as the collective self-name of the Central Plains states, opposed to the four surrounding peoples, the Yi, Di, Rong, and Man; the Zuozhuan under Duke Ding pairs the two graphs in parallel cola, “the outer regions do not plot against the Xia, the alien tribes do not bring disorder among the Hua.” The compound and its halves, zhū Xià “the several Xia” and zhū Huá, run through the ritual and historical texts of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods as the standing term for the civilized community.

Where Zhōngguó is political and spatial, the state at the center, Huáxià is ethno-cultural, the community itself. The two together reproduce on Chinese ground the same split the Persia page draws between Pārsa, the land and polity, and Ērān, the people and their shared identity: a name for the territory beside a name for the nation that fills it. The line dividing those inside the Hua-Xia from those outside was understood to be one of ritual and dress rather than of birth, a boundary a people could in principle cross by adopting the rites. The Middle Kingdom was a place; the Hua-Xia was a way of life that claimed it. The name remains alive: both modern Chinese states carry Zhōnghuá in their official titles, the huá of this ancient pairing still doing constitutional work.

In Isaiah 49:12 the prophet of the exile promises a return of the scattered people from the ends of the earth: “these shall come from far, and these from the north and from the west, and these from the land of Sînîm” (ʾereṣ Sînîm). The identity of Sînîm has been argued since antiquity. One tradition, taken up by some nineteenth-century scholars who heard in it the Cīna/Sina family, read it as a far-eastern land and so as the earliest mention of China in any literature. The reading now preferred by most takes Sînîm as Sĕwēnîm, Syene, the town at Egypt’s southern frontier, the modern Aswan: a reading the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran supports outright, since it writes Sĕwēnîm in this verse.

This entry is marked disputed because the disagreement is real and the weaker reading is the more famous one. The structure of the verse argues against China: it sweeps the compass, north and west and then a fourth quarter, and what it wants to close the circuit is a point in the south, which Syene supplies and a land beyond the Himalayas does not. The Qumran variant, the oldest witness to the text, settles the matter for most readers in favor of Syene. Sînîm is included here not as a name of China but as the ghost of one: the haunting, and almost certainly mistaken, possibility that the Hebrew Bible once gestured at the country at the other edge of the world.

Cīna (चीन) is the Sanskrit name for China and the Chinese, attested in the lists of northern and frontier peoples in the Mahābhārata and named in the Manusmṛti among the tribes held to have fallen from their ritual rank. It is most commonly derived from the dynasty and state of Qín (秦), whose name passed south across the trans-Himalayan routes into the Indian world; the derivation is standard, though it has been debated, since the Qín were a recognized power on the northwestern Chinese frontier from early in the first millennium BCE, well before their brief imperial unification of 221 BCE. From Cīna Sanskrit also built Cīnasthāna, “the land of the Cīna,” and the word for the peach, cīnānī, “the Chinese fruit.”

Cīna is the headwater from which the entire western family of China-names flows. Passing from Sanskrit into Iranian and onward through Greek and Latin geography, it becomes Persian Čīn, Greek Sînai, Latin Sīnae, Arabic al-Ṣīn, and at last the English “China.” Every one of those names is, etymologically, the word “Qín,” carried out of India in a Sanskrit mouth. The dynasty that coined it ruled for fifteen years; its name outlived it by more than two thousand and traveled the breadth of the earth, so that half the world now calls the country by the name of a house that fell almost as soon as it rose.

Sêres (Σῆρες), “the silk people,” and their land Sērikḗ (Σηρική) are the Greek name for the China reached overland, across the steppe and the mountain passes, at the far end of the caravan road. The name is built on sḗr (σήρ), the silkworm or its thread, the commodity by which alone the Greeks knew the country; Strabo reports the Seres as a remote and famously long-lived people, Ptolemy maps Sērikḗ with its capital Sēra in the northeast of his world, and Pausanias gives a curious account of the sēr and how its fiber is spun. The Greeks did not know the Chinese; they knew their export, and named the makers after it.

Sêres is the overland twin of Sînai, and the pair is the heart of this page. Because silk came west by two routes, the land caravan and the sea lane through India, the Greco-Roman world split one country into two: Sērikḗ in the north, met by land, and the Sînai in the south, met by ship. Ptolemy describes them as separate nations with separate capitals. They were the same place, and the geographers never knew it. The name left its deepest mark not on the map but in the languages of Europe: through Latin sēricum, “silk,” the word for the country dissolved into the word for the cloth, so that Sêres survives, unrecognized, every time the fabric is named.

Latin Sēres, the silk-people, and their country Sērica, are taken from the Greek and carry the same meaning: the overland China known only as the source of silk. The name is already a literary commonplace by the Augustan age. Virgil pictures the Seres combing delicate fleeces from the leaves of their trees, a half-understood account of sericulture; Pliny treats them more soberly as the people at the end of the silk route, beyond the Scythians and the Himalayas. The derived adjective sēricus and the noun sēricum, “silk,” made the country’s name into the ordinary Latin word for the cloth.

Sērica is the half of the China-double that Latin geography kept distinct from the maritime Sīnae down to the end of antiquity, and the misunderstanding outlived Rome. But the name’s true afterlife is lexical. Sēricum passed, through a long chain of borrowings across the late-antique and early-medieval world, into the Germanic word that becomes English “silk,” the liquid most likely substituted for the r somewhere along the Baltic trade. The dynasty of Qín gave its name to “China” by the southern road; by the northern one, the silk-land gave its name to silk. The same country lies hidden in both English words, and in neither is it recognizable.

Sînai (Σῖναι), with the byform Thînai (Θῖναι) and the great inland metropolis Thína of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, is the Greek name for the people at the southeastern limit of the inhabited world, reached by the sea route around India. The Periplus, a merchant’s handbook of the mid-first century CE, places Thína beyond the Ganges as the source from which raw silk, floss, and cloth came down to the Indian ports; Ptolemy, a century later, maps the Sînai and their capital at the far eastern edge of his world. The name belongs to the same Qín-derived family as Sanskrit Cīna, taken up by Greek through the maritime trade rather than overland.

Sînai is the sea-route name, and that is its significance. The Greeks reached China by two roads and so came to know it as two countries: the Sînai of the southern ocean, met by ship through India, and the Sêres of the northern caravan track, met by land across the steppe. The two are the same place under two names, and a reader of Ptolemy would not have known it. Sînai is the half of that double that the modern world kept; flattened into Latin Sīnae and revived by early-modern geographers, it survives in the learned prefix Sino- and in the very word “China,” while its overland twin faded into a memory of silk.

Sīnae is the Latin name for the southern, sea-reached Chinese, taken over from the Greek Sînai of Ptolemy’s geographical tradition rather than from any Roman contact with China. It enters Latin learning as a coordinate on the inherited map of the world, the easternmost maritime people beyond the mouth of the Ganges, and it keeps in Latin the same partner it had in Greek: the inland Sêres, the silk-people of the caravan road, set apart from the Sīnae of the ocean as if they were two nations.

That inherited confusion is what Sīnae carries into the European tradition. Roman geography never resolved the Serica of the north and the Sīnae of the south into one country; the two names passed down side by side through the medieval manuscripts of Ptolemy and Pliny, and when early-modern scholars recovered them they at first kept the two apart. The eventual triumph of Sīnae over Serica, helped by the matching Arabic al-Ṣīn that the sea-traders brought west, fixed this form as the learned root for China in the modern languages: the Sino- of “Sinology” and “Sino-Tibetan,” and behind a chain of borrowings the everyday word “China” itself. The sea route won the name; the silk road kept only the silk.

Čīn is the Middle Persian name for China, written here in the Manichaean script (𐫝𐫏𐫗, c-y-n) in which the Manichaean communities of the Iranian east recorded their texts. Manichaeism carried its mission along the Silk Road as far as China itself, and Čīn recurs through the Manichaean corpus recovered at Turfan, the religion naming the very country it had reached. The form belongs to the Qín-derived family, the Iranian reflex of the same name that Sanskrit carries as Cīna. It is given in Manichaean letters rather than the Inscriptional Pahlavi used elsewhere in this atlas for Middle Persian because the Pahlavi script has no sign for the affricate č; the Manichaean alphabet writes it with the letter descended from Aramaic ṣāde, freed for the affricate in a language that had no emphatic ṣ.

Čīn is the Iranian hinge of the whole family. The names that lie west of it, the Greek Sînai and Latin Sīnae, and above all the Arabic al-Ṣīn, took the country through Iran, and the emphatic ṣ of the Arabic form is the fingerprint of this Persian Čīn. The script tells its own version of the same history. To write the name at all, the Iranian Manichaeans needed a letter their inherited Pahlavi could not give them, and they found it by repurposing a Semitic consonant; the name of China survives in Middle Persian only because a borrowed alphabet was bent to hold a sound it was never designed to carry.

cynstn, conventionally read Čīnastān, is the Sogdian name of China, the base čīn with the Iranian land-suffix -stān: “the land of Chin.” It is attested in the Sogdian corpus from the era of the Ancient Letters onward, the merchant correspondence abandoned near Dunhuang around 313 CE, whose writers report from inside the country the famine at the capital, the sack of Ye and Luoyang, and the flight of the emperor; the same letters use the base for the Chinese themselves. The word continues the Sanskrit and Middle Persian Čīna/Čīn of this family, itself most commonly derived from the name of the Qin.

The form’s distinction on this page is its vantage. The Greek and Latin names for China are horizon-words, reports of silk people at the world’s edge; the Sogdian word was written by men who lived in Chinese cities and dated their letters by the disasters of Chinese politics. And the suffix mattered more than the base: -stān went on to build the map of Asia from Turkestan to Hindustan, and in the Persian Čīnistān this exact compound outlived the merchants who first wrote it.

The Armenian name conventionally identified with China, Čenkʿ, the land of the Čen, with Čenastan and Čenacʿ ašxarh as fuller variants. Its most famous attestation is genealogical: Movsēs Xorenacʿi tells how a noble named Mamgon fled the king of Čenkʿ and settled in Armenia, founding the Mamikonean house, the greatest military dynasty of Armenian history, which thereafter claimed descent from the far east; Xorenacʿi’s praise of that homeland, wealthy, peaceable, and devoted to learning, reads like a rumor of China written down at the far end of the road. The form aligns with the Iranian Čīn, and through it with the cina family that names China across this atlas. The identification itself is the disputed point: a strand of scholarship reads Čenkʿ not as China but as a Central Asian country nearer the Jaxartes, and the texts are too far from the referent to settle it.

Whichever land Mamgon actually left, the entry records something rare on this page: a name for China used not to place silk or mark a map’s edge, but to found a family. The Greeks and Romans named China for its exports; the Armenians attached it to a pedigree, so that for a thousand years the marshals of Armenia were, by their own account, princes of Čenkʿ. It is the only name on China’s page that someone claimed as an inheritance, and it was treasured precisely because no one could check: the perfect ancestral homeland is the one at the end of the world.

The last Greek name of China before the ancient tradition closed, Tzínista, in the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, the Alexandrian merchant-turned-monk who had sailed the Indian Ocean routes around 550. Cosmas locates Tzinista as the country of silk at the world’s eastern edge, “beyond which there is no other country, for the ocean encircles it on the east,” and he is the first Western writer to grasp the two roads that reached it, the overland route through Persia and the sea route past Taprobane, modern Sri Lanka. The form is transparently the Iranian Čīnistān, “the land of Čīn,” picked up from the Persian merchants who worked the ocean trade, the same name the atlas records in its Sogdian dress as Chinastan.

The entry completes the page’s Greek triad and its lesson. Classical Greek had named China twice without knowing it, Sêres by the overland silk and Sînai by the sea, and Ptolemy mapped them as two countries; Cosmas, who had actually traded on the ocean, brought back a third name that quietly reunified them, one silk-land with two roads. Each of the three Greek names came in along a trade route, and each kept the shape of its carrier: Sêres smells of the caravan, Sînai of the monsoon ports, and Tzínista of the Persian middlemen who, by late antiquity, owned the conversation. Greece never did learn what China called itself; it learned, three times over, whom one had to ask.

Bēth Sīnāyē (ܒܝܬ ܣܝܢܝܐ), “the land of the Chinese,” is the East Syriac name for China, formed with the toponymic prefix bēth-, “house, land of,” that the Church of the East used across its map of Asia. China was an ecclesiastical province of that church, which sent monks and bishops along the Silk Road as far as the Tang capital; its great monument is the Xi’an stele of 781 CE, a stone inscribed in Chinese and Syriac that records the mission and names its metropolitan see Ṣīnistān. The element Sīnāyē, written with semkath, belongs to the same Cīna/Ṣīn family carried east through Persia.

Bēth Sīnāyē is the only name on this page given by a community that actually reached China and lived in it. Where the Greek and Latin names are coordinates on a geographer’s map and the Sanskrit and Arabic names are the country as known to traders, the Syriac name belongs to a church that built monasteries at Chang’an and translated its scriptures for Chinese readers. The Xi’an stele, carved and then buried for centuries before its rediscovery, is the westernmost of scripts and the easternmost reach of a Syriac-speaking church meeting in a single stone: the alphabet of Edessa, cut in granite, naming the land at the other end of the world.

al-Ṣīn (الصين) is the Arabic name for China, written with the emphatic ṣād. The Arabic geographers and traders made it the standing term for the country at the eastern end of the maritime trade: the Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind, “Accounts of China and India” of 851 CE, is among the earliest detailed Arabic descriptions of the Chinese coast and the port of Canton, and al-Ṣīn recurs throughout the later geographical tradition down to Yāqūt. The form belongs to the Qín-derived family, but it did not come to Arabic directly; the emphatic ṣ, replacing the affricate of Cīna and Čīn, is the trace of its passage through Persian.

That emphatic consonant is the entry’s signature. Arabic received China, like India, along an Iranian road: al-Hind and al-Ṣīn are the twin termini of the Persian-mediated geography the Arabs inherited, and the ṣād of al-Ṣīn marks the same path that the Čīn of Middle Persian lays out one column over. China stood in Arabic for the proverbial edge of the knowable world, the destination of the famous if late-attributed exhortation to seek knowledge “even unto China,” wa-law bi-l-Ṣīn. The country was the far horizon of the earth, and the road to it ran through Iran. Al-Ṣīn is the Arabic name of China still, unchanged from the geographers’ usage to the modern newspaper.

Tabγač is the Old Turkic name of China, the standing term of the Orkhon inscriptions, whose narrative turns on the Türk people’s fifty years of subjection to the Tabγač emperor and their liberation from him. The name is not Chinese at all in origin: it continues the Tuoba, the Xianbei clan that ruled northern China as the Northern Wei in the fourth through sixth centuries, so that the steppe’s word for China preserves the dynasty of steppe conquerors who had most recently mastered it. The form spread widely along the inner Asian routes, and its reflexes served as a name for China in texts far to the west.

Among the names on China’s page, this one uniquely reverses the direction of sight: it is China as the steppe saw it, named for the last nomads to take it rather than for any Chinese state’s own designation. By the time the inscriptions were carved, the Tuoba were long sinicized and gone, and Tang emperors bore no relation to them; the steppe went on calling China by the ghost of its own emigrants. The entries around this one show China named from its dynasties and its silk; Tabγač shows it named, from the north, as a place in the steppe’s own family history, the throne a nomad clan once held and lost.

The Classical Persian name for China, Chīn, continuing Middle Persian Čīn into the new stage with its affricate finally at home: the Perso-Arabic script’s che was invented for exactly such Persian sounds, ending the makeshift by which the older stage had borrowed a Manichaean letter to write its own word. In the Shāhnāma the emperor of Chīn is a stock figure of the eastern horizon, and the geographers pair the name in the phrase Chīn u Māchīn, China and greater China, for the farthest reach of the known world.

The form matters for where it traveled next. Persian was the trade and chancery language of the medieval routes east, and it was largely the Persian shape of this old Sanskrit-Iranian name that later reached European tongues, seeding the forms that become “China” itself. On a page where the cina family already runs from the Mahābhārata to the Arabic geographers, the Persian entry is the relay station: the name of the Qin, twenty dynasties gone, still passing westward through Persian mouths, and Chīn remains the Persian word for China today.

The medieval Latin name of northern China, Cataya, with the variants Cataia and Cathaia, from the ethnonym of the Khitan, the steppe people whose Liao dynasty had ruled northern China and whose name spread west across Asia in Turkic and Mongol mouths as Kitai. William of Rubruck brought the name into Latin in the report of his journey to the Mongol court of 1253 to 1255, and it runs through the whole later travel literature, Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio and the Latin versions of Marco Polo, always for the north of the country, beside Mangi or Manzi for the south. Rubruck, seeing the silks that reached the Mongol camps from Cataya, judged that these people must be the Seres of the ancients, the silk-people the classical geographers had named without ever meeting.

The name reached Europe already obsolete. The Khitan state had fallen in 1125, more than a century before Rubruck wrote, and the Chinese themselves never called their country by the Khitan’s name; Europe learned China’s name from the steppe peoples in between, who had fixed the label of a fallen dynasty onto everything beyond it. On this page Cataya is the second time the West named China at second hand and after the fact, for the Latin Seres before it had named the silk-people from the silk alone. Rubruck’s guess joined the two: the friar on the steppe recognized, in the silks of Cataya, the Seres of the schoolbooks, and for a moment the medieval and the ancient names of China, both wrong in the same secondhand way, met and confirmed each other. The name still lives where the steppe passed it on, in Russian Kitay; Europe let it go, but Cathay kept its shimmer of distance, the name of China as heard across the whole width of Asia.