More than four hundred years ago, Matteo Ricci, an Italian missionary who had lived in China for 28 years, described it in his notes: "Chinese himself have called their country by many different names in the past, and may have other titles in the future, and from the time the current reigning Zhu family came to power, this empire will be called Ming." And as this foreign friend said, in the course of China's thousands of years of history, with the founding of the country, the rise and fall of the dynasty, there have been many different names, these names are what we call the name of the dynasty.
According to the convention, with the change of each dynasty, the name of the country is constantly changing, so how did foreigners in ancient times call China? According to China's literature, we can call out the ancient names of many other countries, such as India was once called Tianzhu, Iran was once called Persia, Vietnam was once called Jiaotong, Japan was once called Dongying and so on. Of course, these are just a term from our point of view, and they themselves have other names, as if we call ourselves "China" and others call us "China". Let's take a look at what the ancient foreigners called us!
First: Khitan
Many peoples in Central asia and Eastern Europe used to call China "Khitan", and the word "Cathay" is sometimes used in English to refer to China. "Cathay" is derived from the Khitans, an ancient Chinese minority who established a powerful regime in northern China, the Liao Dynasty (also known as the Great Khitans). During the Khitan dynasty, its territory stretched from the Sea of Japan in the east, the Altai Mountains in the west, the Erguna River and the Waixing'an Mountains in the north, and the Baigou River in the south in central Hebei. At that time, the military strength of the Liao Dynasty could be described as strong, even the Central Plains Dynasty was in a state of submission, and its influence covered the countries of the Western Regions.
In the long run, after the fall of the Tang Dynasty, the Western Regions, West Asia and Eastern Europe all used the Liao Dynasty (Khitan) as a representative title for China. In the Islamic warrior books of Central asia and West Asia, the gunpowder and firearms passed down from China are also referred to as "Khitan flowers" and "Khitan rockets". To this day, many countries, such as Russia, call China "Kitan" literally. The Russian name of the People's Republic of China, which translates directly as "Khitan People's Republic".
Second: Cyrus
China is the world's earliest country to raise silkworm reeling, since the Western Han Dynasty, China's silk has been shipped abroad in large quantities, becoming a world-famous product. Therefore, in the writings of ancient Greece and Rome, China is called Seres, which means "silk country", silk country, the land of clothing and cultural relics.
It is said that in the first century BC, the Roman consul Julius Caesar the Great wore a Chinese silk robe to see the play, and the gorgeous and luxurious Chinese silk attracted the audience of the theater, and people stood and watched, admiring. Then Chinese silk continued to import into the West, which immediately won the high appreciation of the wealthy classes in Western countries, who regarded Chinese silk as a supreme treasure. But at that time, the West did not understand where silk was produced, let alone how silk was woven. In ancient times, the silk was made of leaves or bamboo leaves, and even famous historians have deduced that the silk came from an animal. Later, it was learned from the silk sellers that this precious silk came from a large country in the East, but did not know the title, so it was called "Cyris", which means "silk country" in Greek, and has been passed down to this day.
Third: Indochina
The term "Indochina" originated in ancient India. In the history of ancient China, the country with which we had the most frequent contact, cultural exchanges, and the most preserved documents was India. The earliest foreigner we know today was the word Cīna in ancient Sanskrit. The whole word is common in Chinese translations of Buddhist scriptures, transliterated as "zhi na", "fat na" or "chi na".
In the historical record "Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty", there is a record: "Wang Yue: 'Where is the Kingdom of the Tang Dynasty?' As announced by the way, to The Far and Near? "When this is more than tens of thousands of miles to the northeast, the so-called Mahachinese kingdom of India is also." And "Mahatsna" here, which means "great China" or "great China," has a very revered meaning.
Indeed, the word "China", from the very beginning of its birth, did not actually mean discrimination, insult, contempt, Chinese. Later, Buddhism was introduced to Japan, and Japan was influenced by buddhist scriptures and began to call China "China", but at that time it was only a transliteration, there was no emotional color, and even revolutionary devotees such as Sun Yat-sen, Zhang Taiyan, and Song Jiaoren who studied in Japan also claimed to be indochina (Chinese), in order to indicate a break with the decadent Qing Dynasty.
The positive and negative changes in the term "China" began at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic.
After the Sino-Japanese War, Japan defeated the Manchu Qing Dynasty, and its reverence for China was even more lost. After the Meiji Restoration, the term "China" became widely used in Japan, and the contemptuous feelings of the winner toward the loser gradually became stronger. In this regard, Chinese people have gradually begun to realize the contempt in the word "China", so their antipathy to this word has become increasingly strong.
By 1930, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had officially issued a clear stipulation that in the future, all Japanese official documents containing the word "China" would be rejected. However, with the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to follow the military department to use "China" to refer to China, calling the "Lugou Bridge Incident" the "Indochina Incident".
In the end, the word "Indochina" disappeared from the oral expression in Japanese, and it was a victory in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea after the founding of New China. When China dared to send troops to Korea and made the Us public opinion exclaim that it encountered "the greatest defeat in the history of the US Army," the Japanese who generally worshipped the United States after the war could not but be deeply shocked! They re-established a sense of admiration for the ancient kingdom of Shenzhou, which had forgotten its ancestors in the past, and the word "China" truly became the usual spoken language of the Japanese.
As a China with a history of 5,000 years of civilization, it has been called a variety of foreign names in ancient times, but most of them are the yearning and respect for ancient China in the East, and only Japan is the most hateful and contemptuous. However, with the growing strength of modern China, China also has its own exclusive name, the English word "China", is because in the seventeenth century, the exquisite ceramics of Jingdezhen, China, were popular in the United Kingdom and other European countries, and the English word "China" is the meaning of ceramics, so Europeans called China "China", over time, the name China has been handed down, and it has been used as an English name of China to this day.
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