China is most probably called China after Qin (秦), the western state whose king unified the country in 221 BCE and founded the Qin dynasty: the name is thought to have passed into Sanskrit as Cīna, into Middle Persian as Chīn (چین), and from there into Portuguese, which gave “China” to English in the 16th century. That is the accepted explanation, but it is not settled. The Oxford English Dictionary still describes the etymology as debated, and scholars have proposed at least two serious rivals, the southern state of Jing and the highland kingdom of Yelang. Chinese speakers, meanwhile, use a different name altogether: Zhongguo (中国), “Central State”. This article sets out the competing explanations first, then weighs the evidence for each, naming the scholars behind them.
Four Candidate Sources for the Word China
Every theory has to explain the same chain of borrowed words. Portuguese explorers brought “China” into European use in the early 1500s; they took it from the Persian Chīn, which matches the Sanskrit Cīna found in Indian texts and the Greek Thina and Sina of classical geographers. The question is what Chinese, or non-Chinese, word stands at the far end. The main candidates are:
- Qin, the state and then dynasty in the north-west, whose name in Old Chinese has been reconstructed as roughly *dzin. This is the traditional and majority view.
- Jing (荆), another name for the southern state of Chu, put forward by some Chinese and Indian scholars.
- Yelang, an ancient kingdom centred on what is now Guizhou in the south-west, whose people, according to the historian Geoff Wade, called themselves Zina.
- An unknown Central Asian word that may have meant Qin but reached India through intermediaries, the position of the Indologist Patrick Olivelle.
Two other names that Europeans used for China, Seres and Cathay, have their own separate origins and are discussed further down, because they explain why “China” was not always the obvious word.
The Qin Case: Martini, Pelliot and Laufer
The Qin theory was first proposed in the 17th century by the Jesuit Martin Martini and later supported by two of the leading sinologists of the early 20th century, Paul Pelliot and Berthold Laufer. Its appeal is easy to see. Qin existed as a state in western China from the 9th century BCE, long before it unified the country, and it sat on the north-western frontier, the side of China that faced the routes into Central Asia and India. Its name, pronounced roughly “chin” in modern Mandarin, is close in sound to Cīna and Chīn.
Qin’s later fame strengthens the case without proving it. Under King Ying Zheng the state conquered its rivals between 230 and 221 BCE, and he declared himself Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor. The dynasty collapsed in 206 BCE, making it the shortest of any major Chinese dynasty, yet it standardised currency, weights, measures and the writing system, and the Han largely continued its military and administrative practices. The connection to the walls that became the Great Wall is covered in our Great Wall of China guide.
The chart shows the central problem with the Qin theory. If foreign peoples named China after its ruling house, the Han, which lasted more than four centuries and gave its name to the majority ethnic group, looks like a more natural source than a dynasty that ruled a unified China only from 221 to 206 BCE, with just two emperors. Defenders answer that the word does not need to come from the dynasty at all: it can come from the much older state, which neighbours to the west had dealt with for centuries before 221 BCE.
Cīna in the Arthashastra, Mahabharata and Laws of Manu
The Indian evidence is where the dating fight happens. The Sanskrit scholar Hermann Jacobi pointed to the word Cīna in Book 2 of the Arthashastra, which mentions silk and woven cloth produced by the country of Cīna. If that book were as old as its traditional attribution to the Maurya period, Cīna would be attested before Qin unified China, which would fit the older state but argue against the dynasty. Textual analysis, however, suggests Book 2 may not have been written long before 150 CE.
Cīna also appears in the Mahabharata and the Laws of Manu, neither of which is securely dated early enough to settle the matter. Patrick Olivelle concluded that the word may not have been known in India before the 1st century BCE. He still thought it probably referred to Qin, but argued that the form itself came into Sanskrit from a Central Asian language rather than directly from Chinese. That is a cautious version of the majority view: Qin at the root, but with an unidentified intermediary.
Jing and Yelang: Geoff Wade and the Southern Theories
The two rival theories both look south rather than north-west. Some Chinese and Indian scholars have argued for Jing, an alternative name of the state of Chu in the middle Yangtze.
The more developed alternative comes from Geoff Wade, who suggested that the Cīnāh of Sanskrit texts referred not to the Chinese heartland at all but to Yelang, a kingdom in present-day Guizhou in the south-western highlands, whose inhabitants called themselves Zina. On this view, Indian traders first met a southern people on the edge of the Chinese world, and only later was the name stretched to cover China as a whole, much as “India” was stretched from one river valley to a subcontinent.
Neither southern theory has displaced Qin, and both are best read as live hypotheses rather than established alternatives. Their value is that they show how thin the early evidence is: a handful of Sanskrit texts of uncertain date, and reconstructed pronunciations of Old Chinese.
Barbosa’s Journal of 1516 and the Road to English
The modern European word has a much firmer date. The earliest record of “China” in a European text is the journal of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa, written in 1516 The form he used is believed to be a borrowing from Middle Persian Chīn. His journal was translated and published in England in 1555, and the word spread through English and other European languages over the following centuries.
Classical writers had known a version of the name much earlier. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, probably from the 1st century CE, records a country called Thin (θίν), and Ptolemy wrote of the Sinai and Thinai. The 19th-century scholar Henry Yule thought these forms reached the Greeks through Arab sailors, who said Sin. Latin Sinae is the source of the prefix “Sino-”, as in Sino-Tibetan or sinology, and of the word Sinica.
Two other European names competed with China for centuries. Seres (Σῆρες), the Greek and Roman name for the people of north-western China, meant roughly “the silk people” and is thought to derive from the Chinese word for silk, 丝 (sī), which also gave Latin sērica. Cathay came from the Khitan, a people from Manchuria who founded the Liao dynasty in northern China in the 10th century; Muslim writers called them Khitay, Marco Polo’s translators used Cathay for northern China, and related words such as Russian Kitay are still the normal name for China in many Turkic and Slavic languages. Both routes ran along the overland trade network described in our guide to the Silk Road.
Zhongguo, From the He Zun to the Treaty of Nerchinsk
Whatever the outcome of the etymology debate, “China” is an exonym. The Chinese name is Zhongguo (中国, traditional 中國), and its earliest known appearance is on the He zun, a bronze vessel dating to about 1038–1000 BCE in the early Western Zhou period, now in the Baoji Bronze Museum in Shaanxi. The vessel stands 38.8 cm tall and weighs 14.6 kg, and the inscription on the inside of its base, 122 characters in 12 rows, dates itself to the fifth year of King Cheng of Zhou. The phrase in question, transcribed in modern characters as 宅茲中國, referred to the “central region” of the newly expanded Zhou domain. In the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) the phrase meant the “Central States” of the Yellow River valley, as distinct from the peoples around them.
For most of imperial history Zhongguo was not the formal name of the state. Dynasties called their realm by the dynastic title: Han, Tang, Great Ming, Great Qing. The term first appeared in a formal international treaty in 1689, in the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia, and by the late 19th century it had become the common name for the whole country. The reformer Liang Qichao complained that China’s “greatest shame” was having no name of its own, only the names of dynasties, and argued for Zhongguo. When the Republic of China (中華民國, Zhonghua Minguo) was founded in 1912, Zhongguo became its standard short form, and the People’s Republic adopted Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo in 1949.
The English phrase “Middle Kingdom” is a translation of this idea that entered European languages through the Portuguese in the 16th century and became popular in the mid-19th. The historian Endymion Wilkinson has pointed out that many cultures saw themselves as central, but China was the only one to build the idea into its name. The People’s Republic chose its symbols in the same year it chose its formal name, 1949, a story told in our article on the flag of China.