Fun With Chinese

Here are some fun (fascinating, actually) facts about China and Chinese.

Middle Kingdom

Ever heard of China referred to as “the Middle Kingdom”?  I had heard this but didn’t really understand what it meant.  It turns out, the explanation is surprisingly simple.  As I started to understand as I was planning my trip, the Chinese name for China is “Zhongguo” (pronounced “Jong-gwaw”).  Zhongguo translates as “Central State” or loosely, “Middle Kingdom”.  Okay, easy.  But why?  There are actually 2 reasons.

Reason #1:  Simply, for millennia China considered itself to be the center of the world, not to mention superior to the rest of the nations of the world.  This is why it was humiliating for the Chinese to accept foreign diplomats into Beijing as equals in diplomacy at the end of the Second Opium War.

Reason #2:  Today, China’s population is largely concentrated in the big cities on and near the coast.  But the cradle of Chinese civilization was inland in the valley of the Yellow River.  The country that became China spread out from there, eventually absorbing non-ethnically Chinese lands, such as Manchuria, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang.  The name Zhongguo initially referred to the Chinese heartland.  Eventually, it became the name for the entire country.

China

So wait a minute.  “China” sounds nothing like “Zhongguo”.  So why do we call Zhongguo China?  Good question.  You may or may not (probably not) remember the Qin Dynasty, China’s first imperial dynasty.  Because you’ve been paying attention to my pronunciation tips (or not), you know that Qin is pronounced “Chin”.  The Qin Dynasty was named after Qin, a western region of ancient China.  This region was the part of China closest to Persia and India.  These foreigners knew of China through this region.  It is believed that the name “China” comes from Persian and Indian interaction with Qin.  Pretty cool!

Han Chinese

China is not at all a diverse nation.  There are 56 officially recognized ethnic groups.  Han Chinese make up about 92% of the population.  That leaves some pretty small pieces of the pie for the other 55 groups.  As a matter of fact, Han are the world’s largest ethnic group, making up 19% of the world’s population.  But why are they called Han instead of just Chinese?  The Han were named after the Han Dynasty, which you’ll remember (maybe) ruled over China’s first golden age.  (Like the Qin Dynasty, the Han Dynasty was named after a region of ancient China.)  The Han Dynasty was so illustrious, members of the ethnic group comprising virtually all of the empire have been calling themselves Han ever since.

Mandarin

So why is the primary Chinese language called Mandarin?  Mandarin, now the official language of China, was originally a language of northern China.  Specifically, it was the language used by imperial officials in Beijing.  You’ll remember (maybe) that the first European incursions into China were by the Portuguese in South China.  The Ming Dynasty permitted the Portuguese to permanently settle in Macau, at the mouth of the Pearl River.  Subsequently, the Qing Dynasty opened up the port at Canton (now Guangzhou), 75 miles up the Pearl River, to foreigners.  The local language of southern China was of course the language we call Cantonese.  The Portuguese understood that the northern language was the official language of the officials.  The Portuguese called these officials mandarins and called their northern language Mandarin.  (It seems the Portuguese picked up this word for Chinese officials from the locals when they were hanging out in Malacca, Malaysia, which I visited in 2012.)

New Names

Canton is now known as Guangzhou.  Beijing used to be Peking.  Out of the 5 cities I visited in China on this trip, Shanghai is the only one whose name hasn’t changed.  What’s that all about?  Well, as I mentioned above, first the Portuguese and then other Europeans initially were restricted to Canton in South China when it came to doing business with the Chinese.  As I also mentioned, the local language was Cantonese.  So the Europeans learned the Cantonese names for Chinese places.  In the 20th century, after the fall of the empire, Mandarin was selected as the official language of the republic.  Later, the Communists adopted pinyin, a standardized system for converting words from the Chinese language into our western alphabet.  The system was adopted internationally in the 1980s.  And Peking has been Beijing ever since.  Except that Beijing has always been Beijing.

Want another good one?  Qingdao (pronounced “Ching-dow”) is a port city in East China.  (I didn’t get there.)  During the time when foreigners occupied many Chinese ports, the Germans had control over Qingdao for many years.  They established a brewery while they were there.  Qingdao was formerly known as Tsingtao.  Makes sense, right?

Thank You!

Well, that’s been fun!  And while we’re on the topic of the Chinese language, there’s one thing I kept messing up in Chinese on my trip.  “Xie xie ni” means thank you.  (A little bit more formal than just “xie xie”.)  Certainly a very important phrase to learn.  It’s sort of pronounced “shay shay nee”.  But half the time, I pronounced it “shee shee nay”.  God only knows what I was actually saying to those poor Chinese people that I addressed this way.

Anyway, if you’ve gotten this far, xie xie ni!

[Factual information is primarily gathered from Wikipedia, so you know it must be true.]