Herzberg - China Smart: What You Dont Know, What You Need to Know- A Past & Present Guide to History, Culture, Society, Language

The word we use in English to describe the worlds most populous country actually bears no resemblance to the term the Chinese themselves use.

There are various scholarly theories regarding the origin of the word China. The traditional theory most popularly accepted today was proposed in the 17th century by Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary, cartographer, and historian who spent much of his life in China. Martini posited that China is derived from Qin (, pronounced chin), the name of the westernmost of the Chinese kingdoms during the Zhou dynasty and that of the succeeding Qin dynasty (221206 BC), under which the various kingdoms were first united.

However, some scholars now believe that the word China is actually derived from Cin, a Persian name for China popularized in Europe by Marco Polo. The first recorded use in English dates from 1555. In early usage, china as a term for porcelain was spelled differently from the name of the country, the two words being derived from separate Persian words. Both these words came from the Sanskrit word Cna, used as a name for China as early as AD 150. In the Hindu scriptures Mahbhrata (5th century BC) and Manusmti (Laws of Manu; 2nd century BC), the Sanskrit word Cna is used to refer to a country located in the Tibeto-Burman borderlands east of India.

Even if the Jesuit Father Martini had been correct about the word China deriving from the name of the first Chinese dynasty, the Chinese people would never have called their country by that name in subsequent centuries. The Qin dynasty was by far the briefest of all Chinese dynasties. It lasted a mere fifteen years, ending only four years after the death of the First Emperor. During his eleven-year reign the first Qin Emperor did have some impressive accomplishments. He undertook gigantic projects, including ordering the building and unifying of various sections of what we now call the Great Wall of China to protect his new country from invasion by the barbarians to the north. He created a massive national road system. He also standardized weights and measures and even wheel ruts across all the kingdoms he administered. The Chinese writing system was also standardized for the newly unified country.

Most of this came at the expense of a great many lives. The building of the Great Wall and the national road system was only made possible through the conscripted labor of hundreds of thousands of peasants. These unfortunate men were often taken hundreds of miles from their villages to work many hard years on the frontiers. A large percentage of them never returned to their families but died in these forced-labor projects.

In order to avoid having antigovernment scholars compare his reign with the past, the Qin Emperor ordered most existing books be burned. The only exceptions were those on astrology, divination, medicine, and agriculture, as well as those that related the history of the Kingdom of Qin. The burning of so many books from the past also furthered the ongoing reformation of the writing system by removing examples of variant forms of Chinese characters. Most infamous of all was that this first of the worlds book-burning dictators had nearly five hundred scholars buried alive for illicitly owning such classic works as the Book of Songs and the Classic of History