Upvote:9
The Qin Dynasty is remarkable in unifying China for the first time, but this accomplishment alone is not enough to explain the name. Two reasons: one, Qin Dynasty is far from the most remarkable even to Chinese people, who might refer to themselves as 漢人 (Han people) or even 唐人 (Tang people), and never as "Qin people". Second, when it comes to names foreigners generally don't give a damn what your domestic accomplishments are, they just use the first name they hear that sticks. See for example the names of Germany or the American "Indians".
The real reason would be hard to prove, but I think there are two strong reasons why the name came from Qin:
First contact with the Greco-Bactrians
One of the earliest contacts between the West and China might have been during the reign of the Greco-Bactrian king Euthydemus I, who ruled between 230–200 BC. During his reign the kingdom continued its eastward expansion, and may have come in contact with the contemporaneous Qin dynasty (221 to 206 BC). Thus the Qin may have given its name in a tremendous luck of timing.
Qin's position in the West
But even if contact existed, albeit unrecorded, long before this, it's also very likely that Western observers would have encountered the Qin state, which later conquered China and became the Qin dynasty. At the start of the Warring States period (~450 BC), Qin was already a major state in the far West, and became dominant via aggressive westward expansion and opening up lucrative westward trade (its capital Xianyang is basically in the same area as Chang'an, the famous Silk Road city). Anyone wishing to trade with China during this time would basically pass through Qin.
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Upvote:14
The Ch’in dynasty united modern China and greatly advanced Chinese culture; that's why modern-day China is named for this short but great dynasty.
The remarkable Ch'in dynasty arose from the remains of the Chou dynasty in 255 B.C.
Although it lasted only 40 years, the Ch’ins united almost all of China and also finished constructing the Great Wall.
The Qin dynasty ruled in China from 221 BC to 206 BC. It was created by the warlord Qin Shi Huang during the Warring States Period and defeated several other states in the area to unite China. While the Qin ruled China for only a very short time, they built both the Terracotta Army and parts of the Great Wall of China. The second, and final emperor, Qin Er Shi, was overthrown by a popular rebellion after the first Qin emperor died. It was followed by the Han dynasty. The Han dynasty was founded by Liu Bang in 202 BC.
Source: Simple English Wikipedia
Upvote:20
The Chinese actually refer to themselves as the Han most of the time. Why do westerners refer to China as such then? Well, it is more complicated than you might think. China is either a Persian or Sanskrit word for a kingdom in central Asia that might be the Qin dynasty, or might be something else. Marco Polo seems to be the one who brought this name back to Europe after traveling to both these places, but where he got it from exactly is a mystery.
Upvote:53
The original question is a bit vague as to who exactly is calling China, well, "China." This also means that it's a bit tricky to pin down what exactly the word "China" refers to (e.g. is it the same word as "Cathay," "Sina," etc.? Is it even referring to a nation?), especially because it's not at all a certainty that "China" is derived from "Ch'in/Qin" (I'll refer to it by its Pinyin romanization "Qin" for the rest of this answer). It's also not exactly clear what "Qin" refers to as there are many political entities in China's history that shared that name. The first dynasty to unify China? The state that preceded the dynasty? One of quite a few states in later periods of disunity? So let's address each part of that.
Here's some more details on each one in turn. But first caveats galore.
Nailing down exactly what a "nation" (and hence what actually corresponds to the notion of "China") is gets pretty difficult as you go back in time: Modern nation-states have a tendency to tie together a piece of land, a government institution, and a cultural heritage in a single package. These things historically have often not been packaged together in many societies and "China" is no exception. A single government might control many different lands and many different peoples, a single land might be controlled by many different governments and many different people, or a single people might be subjects of many different governments and live in many different lands.
I'm going to be moving loosely between words that apply to land that is a sizable subset of modern-day China and people whose culture most Chinese people would probably agree is part of their cultural heritage.
With those in mind, let's dive in!
The Chinese people have called their nation and themselves many names through time, many of which come from dynastic names. Qin does not figure among them however (except during times and places of rule by the Qin). The first dynasty of China had a rather bad rap among later generations, mainly due to massacring scholars who didn't follow the Legalist school of thought. As the early 20th century Sinologist Berthold Laufer put it:
[The] Chinese people never called themselves after the Ts'in for whom their scholars professed a thorough contempt... (The Name China. Berthold Laufer. T'oung Pao, Second Series, Vol. 13, No. 5 (1912). pg. 723)
Here's a list of alternatives.
Early 20th century Sinologists such as Paul Pelliot and Berthold Laufer expounded at length about the likelihood that the Indo-European cognates of "China" all come from Qin (Laufer in particular changes his opinion later in life from initially opposing the idea to coming around to it). This is far from unanimous though. Endymion Wilkinson instead seems to attribute the origin to "silk":
"Seres" (the silk people) may have been intended by some Roman writers to refer ot the Chinese. "Silk" possibly came from Latin sericus, itself in turn derived by way of Greek and Roman from the Old Chinese pronunciation sie for si (Chinese History: A Manual. Wilkinson. Pg. 752)
This mainly matches with the timelines established for most of the Indo-European cognates claimed to have descended from Qin. In particular, Laufer and Pelliot both mention a 300 B.C. dating of the Sanskrit word Cina given by Hermann Jacobi, which Laufer initially takes as evidence against the Qin origin and which Pelliot seems to hand-wave away as a potential hedge that perhaps "China" comes from the pre-unification Qin state, but still believes
L'opinion traditionnelle, qui invoque le souvenir de Ts'in Che-houang-ti, me paraît encore, sinon certaine, du moins le plus probable. (L'Origine du nom de "Chine". Paul Pelliot. T'oung Pao, Second Series, Vol. 13, No. 5 (1912). Pg. 740.)
The traditional opinion [that "Chine" comes from Qin], which invokes the memory of Qin Shi Huangdi, still appears to me, if not certain, at least the most probable.
At the end of the day it seems like all the academic sources just settle on Occam's Razor. Like I said, hard to answer well or rigorously.