Cathay
Cathay is a historical name for China that was used in Europe. During the early modern period, the term Cathay initially evolved as a term referring to what is now Northern China, completely separate and distinct from China, which was a reference to southern China. As knowledge of East Asia increased, Cathay came to be seen as the same polity as China as a whole. The term Cathay became a poetic name for China.
The name Cathay originates from the term Khitan, a nomadic people who ruled the Liao dynasty in northern China from 916 to 1125, and who later migrated west after they were overthrown by the Jin dynasty to form the Qara Khitai 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 in Marco Polo's book on his travels in Yuan dynasty China. Odoric of Pordenone also writes about Cathay and the Khan in his travelbooks from his journey before 1331, perhaps 1321–1330.
History
The term Cathay came from the name for the Khitans. A form of the name Cathai is attested in a Uyghur Manichaean document describing the external people circa 1000. The Khitans refer to themselves as Qidan, but in the language of the ancient Uyghurs the final -n or -ń became -y, and this form may have been the source of the name Khitai for later Muslim writers. This version of the name was then introduced to medieval and early modern Europe via Muslim and Russian sources.The Khitans were known to Muslim Central Asia: in 1026, the Ghaznavid court was visited by envoys from the Liao ruler, he was described as a "Qatā Khan", i.e. the ruler of Qatā; Qatā or Qitā appears in writings of al-Biruni and Abu Said Gardezi in the following decades. The Persian scholar and administrator Nizam al-Mulk mentions Khita and China in his Book on the Administration of the State, apparently as two separate countries.
The name's currency in the Muslim world survived the replacement of the Khitan Liao dynasty with the Jurchen Jin dynasty in the early 12th century. When describing the fall of the Jin Empire to the Mongols, Persian history described the conquered country as Khitāy or Djerdaj Khitāy. The Mongols themselves, in their Secret History talk of both Khitans and Kara-Khitans.
In about 1340 Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, a merchant from Florence, compiled the Pratica della mercatura, a guide about trade in China, a country he called Cathay, noting the size of Khanbaliq and how merchants could exchange silver for Chinese paper money that could be used to buy luxury items such as silk.
Words related to Khitay are still used in many Turkic and Slavic languages to refer to China. The ethnonym derived from Khitay in the Uyghur language for Han Chinese is considered pejorative by both its users and its referents, and the PRC authorities have attempted to ban its use. The term also strongly connotes Uyghur nationalism.
Cathay and Mangi
As European and Arab travelers started reaching the Mongol Empire, they described the Mongol-controlled Northern China as Cathay in a number of spelling variants. The name occurs in the writings of Giovanni da Pian del Carpine , and William of Rubruck . Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan by Marco 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 the Song dynasty, was Mangi, Manzi, Chin, or Sin. The word Manzi or Mangi is a derogatory term in Chinese meaning "barbarians of the south" , 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. The name for South China commonly used on Western medieval maps was Mangi, a term still used in maps in the 16th century.Identifying China as Cathay
The division of China into northern and southern parts ruled by, in succession, the Liao, Jin and Yuan dynasties in the north, and the Song 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 to Cathay, that country was known to the peoples of Southeast Asia and India under names similar to China. 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 and Da Qing Guo, or as Zhongguo ; see also Names of China for details.
When the Portuguese reached Southeast Asia and the southern coast of China, they started calling the country by the name used in South and Southeast Asia. It was not immediately clear to the Europeans whether this China is the same country as Cathay known from Marco Polo. Therefore, it would not be uncommon for 16th-century maps to apply the label China just to the coastal region already well known to the Europeans, and to place the mysterious Cathay somewhere inland.
It was a small group of Jesuits, led by Matteo 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 Matteo Ricci formed a strong suspicion that Marco Polo's Cathay is simply the Tatar name for the
country he was in, i.e. China. Ricci supported his arguments by numerous correspondences between Marco Polo's accounts and his own observations:
- The River "Yangtze" divides the empire into two halves, with nine provinces south of the river and six to the north;
- Marco Polo's "Cathay" was just south of "Tartary", and Ricci learned that there was no other country between the Ming Empire and "Tartary".
- People in China had not heard of any place called "Cathay".
China-based Jesuits promptly informed their colleagues in Goa and Europe about their discovery of the Cathay–China identity. This was stated e.g. in a 1602 letter of Ricci's comrade Diego de Pantoja, which was published in Europe along with other Jesuits' letters in 1605. The Jesuits in India, however, were not convinced, because, according to their informants, Cathay – a country that could be reached via Kashgar – had a large Christian population, while the Jesuits in China had not found any Christians there.
In retrospect, the Central Asian Muslim informants' idea of the Ming China being a heavily Christian country may be explained by numerous similarities between Christian and Buddhist ecclesiastical rituals – from having sumptuous statuary and ecclesiastical robes to Gregorian chant – which would make the two religions appear externally similar to a Muslim merchant. This may also have been the genesis of the Prester John myth.
To resolve the China–''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 crossing Afghanistan, Badakhshan, Kashgaria, and Kingdom of Cialis with Muslim trade caravans. In 1605, in Cialis, he, too, became convinced that his destination is 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.. De Góis died in Suzhou, Gansu – the first Ming China city he reached – while waiting for an entry permit to proceed toward Beijing; but, in the words of Henry Yule, it was his expedition that made "Cathay... finally disappear from view, leaving China only in the mouths and minds of men".
File:John-Speed-The-Kingdome-of-China-1626-2544.jpg|thumb|left|Not convinced by the Jesuits, John Speed in 1626 follows Jodocus Hondius' layout: He shows the chain of Silk Road cities visited by de Góis – but has it directed not toward China's Shaanxi Sancii, as shown by de Góis, but toward the mysterious "Cathaya, the Chief Kingdome of Great Cam", northeast of China. Naturally, Cambalu and Xandu are shown in Cathay, while Shuntien is in China.
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. In this period, many cartographers were placing Cathay on the Pacific coast, north of Beijing which was already well known to Europeans. The borders drawn on some of these maps would first make Cathay the northeastern section of China, or, later, a region separated from China by the Great Wall and possibly some mountains and/or wilderness.
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 Dutch governor of East Indies Jan Pieterszoon Coen to embark on an "unfortunate" policy of treating the Ming Empire as "merely another 'oriental' kingdom".
File:CEM-36-Regno-della-China-2355.jpg|thumb|Cathay is finally gone: This 1689 map by Giacomo Cantelli da Vignola from Modena identifies it with China.
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 Dutch Orientalist Jacobus Golius met with the China-based Jesuit Martino Martini, who was passing through Leyden. Golius knew no Chinese, but he was familiar with Zij-i Ilkhani, a work by the Persian astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, completed in 1272, in which he described the Chinese calendar. Upon meeting Martini, Golius started reciting the names of the 12 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 24 solar 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.
Even then, some people still viewed Cathay as distinct from China, as did John Milton in the 11th Book of his Paradise Lost.
In 1939, Hisao Migo published a paper describing Iris cathayensis in the Journal of the Shanghai Science Institute''.