CHAPTER FOUR

GEOGRAPHY

4.1 Defining : What’s in a Name?

In describing China, European observers had been well aware of the fact that the name they used for the country represents an exonym and thus originally had been unknown to the Chinese. Throughout our period of consideration, European encyclopaedias regularly listed Chinese names for the country described. They also added exonyms for China used by the other East Asian and Southeast Asian people.1 In the opening paragraph to its article on ‘China’, Rees’ Cyclopaedia gave a concise presentation of the name of the country: The word China is well known to the people whom we call Chinese; but the most learned among them never apply it to themselves or their coun- try. They wish to be described as the people of Han, or of some other illustrious family, by the memory of whose actions they flatter their national pride; and their country they call Chum-cue [i.e. Zhongguo], or the central kingdom, representing it in their symbolical characters by a parallelogram exactly bisected; at other times they distinguish it by words that mean all that is valuable upon earth.2 Before the nineteenth century, when Zhongguo 中國—the expression referred to in the quotation above—emerged as the name for the coun- try there existed numerous other expressions. During the Western Zhou 西周 (1045–771 BC), the term Zhongguo referred to all ‘inside the kingdom’ (guozhong 國中 in the sense of guonei 國内). Afterwards the term was used to refer to some of the feudal states in the middle and lower Huang He () region. In the Confucian classics the term Zhongguo represents a “concept to differentiate the [華夏, literally ‘glorious and extensive’ [which] originally referred to a

1 See e.g. Encyclopédie Moderne 6 (1825) 585 (new ed. vol. 9, col. 142); Encyclopédie Catholique, vol. 7 (1844) 269. 2 Rees, Cyclopaedia, vol. 7, fol. 4O2r (s. v. ‘China’).—Italics according to the original. 144 chapter four group of people living along the Yellow River] from the .”3 During the third and fourth centuries AD, the terms Zhongguo and Huaxia were abbreviated to Zhonghua 中華, an expression that soon came into general use.4 As we may see from Johann Jacob Hofmann’s Lexicon Universale, the denominations of China as Zhongguo (Middle Kingdom; trans- lated by Hofmann as medium regnum) and Zhonghua (translated as medius hortus) were known to Europeans by the end of the seven- teenth century.5 In 1743, Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon mentioned the terms Zhongguo, Zhonghua, Da Qing Guo 大清國 (Realm of the Great Qing), and also Taipingguo 太平國 (Realm of Great Peace)—a term that did not occur in any other of the encyclopaedias inspected.6 For one and a half century information on Chinese denominations for China had been derived from the writings of (mainly Jesuit) mis- sionaries. English-language encyclopaedias usually only mentioned the term Zhongguo.7 In the Encyclopédie Nouvelle, Pauthier mentions the terms Zhongguo and 天下, the latter rendering as ‘le Dessous du Ciel’ (i.e. ‘All under Heaven’).8 In the Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle, Édouard Biot (1803–1850) only introduced French translations for the denominations Zhongguo (‘royaume du milieu’, i.e. Middle Kingdom) and Zhonghua (‘fleur du milieu’, i.e. flower of the middle).9 Presumably due to the beginnings of serious scholarly studies of the , this list was continuously enlarged. In 1841, the sec- ond edition of Pierer’s Universal-Lexikon presented eight different Chi- nese denominations for China (Zhongguo, Zhonghua, Da Qing Guo, Tianxia, Sihai 四海 (lit. ‘’), Zhendan 震旦 (i.e. the abbrevi- ated phonetical transcription for the Sanskrit ‘Cinasthana’, referring to the dynasty, third century BC), Dongtu 東土 (lit. ‘Land in the East’), and Tianchao 天朝 (lit. ‘Celestial Dynasty’).10 Four years later,

3 Wilkinson, Chinese History, 132 (Box 2).—On these early concepts of Chinese- ness see Chen Zhi, “From Exclusive Xia to Inclusive Zhu-Xia: The Conceptualisation of Chinese Identity in Early China,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 3rd series, 14, no. 3 (Nov. 2004), 185–205. 4 Wilkinson, Chinese History, 132 (Box 2). 5 Johann Jacob Hofmann, Lexicon universale, 3rd ed. (1698), vol. 1, p. 834a. 6 Zedler 37 (1743) col. 1556. 7 Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, vol. 6, p. 206. 8 Encyclopédie Nouvelle 3 (1837) 524.—On the term tianxia see Cohen, Introduc- tion to Research in Chinese Source Materials, 474. 9 Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle 7 (1845) 452. 10 Pierer, 2nd ed., vol. 6 (1841) 420.