_according_to_the_Catalan_Atlas_(1375).jpg)
.png)
) appears on all the territory.[1][2]Cathay (/kæˈθeɪ/ka-THAY) is ahistorical name forChina that was used in Europe. During the early modern period, the termCathay initially evolved as a term referring to what is now Northern China, completely separate and distinct fromChina, which was a reference to southern China. As knowledge ofEast Asia increased, Cathay came to be seen as the same polity as China as a whole. The termCathay became a poetic name for China.
The nameCathay originates from the termKhitan[3] (Chinese:契丹;pinyin:Qìdān), apara-Mongolic nomadic people who ruled theLiao dynasty innorthern China from 916 to 1125, and who later migrated west after they were overthrown by theJin dynasty to form theQara Khitai (Western Liao dynasty) for another century thereafter. Originally, this name was the name applied by Central and Western Asians and Europeans to northern China; the name was also used inMarco Polo's book on histravels inYuan dynasty China (he referred tosouthern China asMangi).Odoric of Pordenone (d. 1331) also writes about Cathay and the Khan in his travelbooks from his journey before 1331, perhaps 1321–1330.
The termCathay came from the name for the Khitans. A form of the nameCathai is attested in aUyghurManichaean document describing the external people circa 1000.[4] The Khitans refer to themselves as Qidan (Khitan small script:
;Chinese:契丹), but in the language of the ancientUyghurs the final -n or -ń became -y, and this form may have been the source of the nameKhitai for later Muslim writers.[5] This version of the name was then introduced to medieval and early modern Europe via Muslim and Russian sources.[6]
The Khitans were known to Muslim Central Asia: in 1026, theGhaznavid court (inGhazna, in today's Afghanistan) was visited by envoys from the Liao ruler, he was described as a "Qatā Khan", i.e. the ruler ofQatā;Qatā orQitā appears in writings ofal-Biruni andAbu Said Gardezi in the following decades.[4] The Persian scholar and administratorNizam al-Mulk (1018–1092) mentionsKhita andChina in hisBook on the Administration of the State, apparently as two separate countries[4] (presumably, referring to theLiao andSong Empires, respectively).
The name's currency in the Muslim world survived the replacement of the Khitan Liao dynasty with the JurchenJin dynasty in the early 12th century. When describing the fall of the Jin Empire to the Mongols (1234), Persian history described the conquered country asKhitāy orDjerdaj Khitāy (i.e., "Jurchen Cathay").[4] The Mongols themselves, in theirSecret History (13th century) talk of both Khitans and Kara-Khitans.[4]
In about 1340Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, a merchant fromFlorence, compiled thePratica della mercatura, a guide about trade in China, a country he calledCathay, noting the size ofKhanbaliq (modernBeijing) and how merchants could exchange silver forChinesepaper money that could be used to buy luxury items such as silk.[7][8]
Words related to Khitay are still used in manyTurkic andSlavic languages to refer to China. The ethnonym derived from Khitay in theUyghur language forHan Chinese is considered pejorative by both its users and its referents, and thePRC authorities have attempted to ban its use.[6] The term also strongly connotesUyghur nationalism.[9]
As European and Arab travelers started reaching theMongol Empire, they described the Mongol-controlled Northern China asCathay in a number of spelling variants. The name occurs in the writings ofGiovanni da Pian del Carpine (c. 1180–1252) (asKitaia), andWilliam of Rubruck (c. 1220–c. 1293) (asCataya orCathaia).[10]Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan byMarco Polo has a story called "The Road to Cathay".Rashid-al-Din Hamadani,ibn Battuta, and Marco Polo all referred to Northern China as Cathay, while Southern China, ruled by theSong dynasty, wasMangi,Manzi,Chin, orSin.[10] The wordManzi (蠻子) orMangi is a derogatory term in Chinese meaning "barbarians of the south" (Man was used to describeunsinicised Southern China in its earlier periods), and would therefore not have been used by the Chinese to describe themselves or their own country, but it was adopted by the Mongols to describe the people and country of Southern China.[11][12] The name for South China commonly used on Western medieval maps wasMangi, a term still used in maps in the 16th century.[13]
The division of China into northern and southern parts ruled by, in succession, theLiao,Jin andYuan dynasties in the north, and theSong dynasty in the south, ended in the late 13th century with the conquest of southern China by the Yuan dynasty.
While Central Asia had long known China under names similar toCathay, that country was known to the peoples ofSoutheast Asia and India under names similar toChina (cf. e.g.Cina in modern Malay). Meanwhile, in China itself, people usually referred to the realm in which they lived on the name of the ruling dynasty, e.g.Da Ming Guo ("Great Ming state") andDa Qing Guo ("Great Qing state"), or asZhongguo (中國, lit.Middle Kingdom orCentral State); see alsoNames of China for details.
When the Portuguese reached Southeast Asia (Afonso de Albuquerque conqueringMalacca in 1511) and the southern coast of China (Jorge Álvares reaching thePearl River estuary in 1513), they started calling the country by the name used in South and Southeast Asia.[14] It was not immediately clear to the Europeans whether thisChina is the same country asCathay known fromMarco Polo. Therefore, it would not be uncommon for 16th-century maps to apply the labelChina just to the coastal region already well known to the Europeans (e.g., justGuangdong onAbraham Ortelius' 1570 map), and to place the mysterious Cathay somewhere inland.
It was a small group ofJesuits, led byMatteo Ricci who, being able both to travel throughout China and to read, learned about the country from Chinese books and from conversation with people of all walks of life. During his first fifteen years in China (1583–1598) Matteo Ricci formed a strong suspicion that Marco Polo'sCathay is simply the Tatar (i.e.,Mongol) name for thecountry he was in, i.e. China. Ricci supported his arguments by numerous correspondences between Marco Polo's accounts and his own observations:
Most importantly, when the Jesuits first arrived to Beijing 1598, they also met a number of "Mohammedans" or "Arabian Turks" – visitors or immigrants from the Muslim countries to the west of China, who told Ricci that now theywere living in the Great Cathay. This all made them quite convinced that Cathay was indeed China.[15]
China-based Jesuits promptly informed their colleagues inGoa (Portuguese India) and Europe about their discovery of the Cathay–China identity. This was stated e.g. in a 1602 letter of Ricci's comradeDiego de Pantoja, which was published in Europe along with other Jesuits' letters in 1605.[16] The Jesuits in India, however, were not convinced, because, according to their informants (merchants who visited theMughal capitalsAgra andLahore), Cathay – a country that could be reached viaKashgar – had a large Christian population, while the Jesuits in China had not found any Christians there.[17][18]
In retrospect, the Central Asian Muslim informants' idea of the Ming China being a heavily Christian country may be explained by numerous similarities betweenChristian and Buddhist ecclesiastical rituals – from having sumptuous statuary and ecclesiastical robes toGregorian chant – which would make the two religions appear externally similar to a Muslim merchant.[19] This may also have been the genesis of thePrester John myth.
To resolve theChina–Cathay controversy, the India Jesuits sent a Portuguese lay brother,Bento de Góis, on an overland expedition north and east, with the goal of reaching Cathay and finding out once and for all whether it is China or some other country. Góis spent almost three years (1603–1605) crossingAfghanistan,Badakhshan,Kashgaria, and Kingdom ofCialis with Muslim tradecaravans. In 1605, inCialis, he, too, became convinced that his destinationis China, as he met the members of a caravan returning from Beijing to Kashgar, who told them about staying in the same Beijing inn with Portuguese Jesuits. (In fact, those were the same very "Saracens" who had, a few months earlier, confirmed it to Ricci that they were in "Cathay"). De Góis died inSuzhou, Gansu – the firstMing China city he reached – while waiting for an entry permit to proceed toward Beijing; but, in the words ofHenry Yule, it was his expedition that made "Cathay... finally disappear from view, leavingChina only in the mouths and minds of men".[20]
Ricci's and de Gois' conclusion was not, however, completely convincing for everybody in Europe yet.Samuel Purchas, who in 1625 published an English translation of Pantoja's letter and Ricci's account, thought that perhaps Cathay still can be found somewhere north of China.[18] In this period, many cartographers were placing Cathay on the Pacific coast, north of Beijing (Pekin) which was already well known to Europeans. The borders drawn on some of these maps would first make Cathay the northeastern section of China (e.g.1595 map byGerardus Mercator), or, later, a region separated by China by theGreat Wall and possibly some mountains and/or wilderness (as in a1610 map byJodocus Hondius, or a1626 map byJohn Speed).J. J. L. Duyvendak hypothesized that it was the ignorance of the fact that "China" is the mighty "Cathay" of Marco Polo that allowed the Dutchgovernor of East IndiesJan Pieterszoon Coen to embark on an "unfortunate" (for the Dutch) policy of treating the Ming Empire as "merely another 'oriental' kingdom".[21]
The last nail into the coffin of the idea of there being a Cathay as a country separate from China was, perhaps, driven in 1654, when the DutchOrientalistJacobus Golius met with the China-based JesuitMartino Martini, who was passing throughLeyden. Golius knew no Chinese, but he was familiar withZij-i Ilkhani, a work by the Persian astronomerNasir al-Din al-Tusi, completed in 1272, in which he described theChinese ("Cathayan") calendar.[22] Upon meeting Martini, Golius started reciting the names of the12 divisions into which, according to Nasir al-Din, the "Cathayans" were dividing the day – and Martini, who of course knew no Persian, was able to continue the list. The names of the 24solar terms matched as well. The story, soon published by Martini in the "Additamentum" to his Atlas of China, seemed to have finally convinced most European scholars that China and Cathay were the same.[18]
Even then, some people still viewed Cathay as distinct from China, as didJohn Milton in the 11th Book of hisParadise Lost (1667).[23]
In 1939, Hisao Migo (Japanese:御江久夫, a Japanese botanist[24][25]) published a paper describingIris cathayensis (meaning "Chinese iris") in theJournal of the Shanghai Science Institute.[26]
Below is the etymological progression from "Khitan" to Cathay as the word travelled westward:
| Part of a series on |
| Names of China |
|---|
|
In manyTurkic andSlavic languages a form of "Cathay" (e.g.,Russian:Китай,Kitay) remains the usual modern name for China. InJavanese, the wordꦏꦠꦻ (Katai,Katé) exists,[27] and it refers to "East Asian", literally meaning "dwarf" or "short-legged" in today's language.[citation needed]
In Uyghur, the word "Xitay (Hitay)" is used as a derogatory term for Ethnic Han Chinese.[28]
In theEnglish language, the wordCathay was sometimes used for China, although increasingly only in a poetic sense, until the 19th century, when it was completely replaced byChina. Demonyms for the people of Cathay (i.e.,Chinese people) wereCathayan andCataian. The termsChina andCathay have histories of approximately equal length in English.Cathay is still used poetically. TheHong Kong flag-bearing airline is namedCathay Pacific. One of the largest commercial banks of Taiwan is namedCathay United Bank.
The novelCreation byGore Vidal uses the name in reference to "those states between the Yangtze and the Yellow Rivers" as the novel is set in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.Ezra Pound'sCathay (1915) is a collection of classical Chinese poems translated freely into English verse.
InRobert E. Howard'sHyborian Age stories (including the tales ofConan the Barbarian), the analog of China is calledKhitai.
InWarhammer Fantasy, a fantastical reimagination of the world used as a setting for various novels and games produced byGames Workshop, Grand Cathay is the largest human empire, situated in the far east of the setting and based on medieval China.[29]
Cathay is more prevalent in proper terms, such as inCathay Pacific Airways orCathay Hotel.
Cathay Bank is a bank with multiple branches throughout the United States and other countries.
Cathay Cineplexes is a cinema operator in Singapore operated by mm2 Asia, acquired from theCathay Organisation.
Cathay United Bank andCathay Life Insurance are, respectively, a financial services company and an insurance company, both located in Taiwan.
