Eighteenth-century, Chinese, white, porcelain flask painted with an underglaze of blue waves and clouds and a red dragon
7 July 2020
The name for the country in Asia and the porcelain-ware named for it ultimately comes from Middle Chinese tsɦin, rendered in Pinyin as Qin. In Mandarin, the name refers to a state in what is now western China, c. 897–206 BCE, and a dynasty that ruled 221–206 BCE. The word’s exact route into English is uncertain, but the name makes its way into European languages with the earliest editions of the Travels of Marco Polo in the early fourteenth century. English borrowed it from Latin or another continental language.
It appears in a 1533 English translation of Damião de Góis’s The Legacye or Embassate of the Great Emperour of Inde Prester Iohn, vnto Emanuell Kynge of Portyngale. In this passage, de Góis is referring to one George Lupe Dandrade:
In the tyme of his beyng at Inde for certayne maters he had there of his prynce (where he remayned by the space of certayne yeres) one a very valyant man Lupus Soarez, by the kynges commaundement was the chyefe capitayne of the Portyngales warres, & chyefe ruler of all the realmes, cyttes, townes, and castelles, that be vnder the kynge of Portyngales domynyon, euen from Ethiope, thorough out the Chynas.
China used as a designation for porcelain appears in English by the end of the sixteenth century. It first appears as a modifier before becoming a standalone noun for the porcelain-ware. Here is a 1588 English translation of Venetian Cesare Federici’s travels to Asia:
Both the Citties are portes of the sea, and are great cities, and haue vnto them great traffique & trade of marchandize, of all sortes of spices, Drugges, Silke cloth of silk, Sandolo, Marfine, Versiue, Procelane of China: Ueluets and Scarlets that come from Portingale, and from Meca: with many other sorts of marchandize.
In his 1597 Navigator’s Supply, William Barlow recounts a conversation he had Filipino and Japanese sailors that refers to porcelain as China earth:
They described all things farre different from ours, and shewed, that in steade of our Compas, they vse a Magneticall Needle of sixe ynches long, and longer, vpon a pinne in a dish of white China earth filled with water: In the bottome whereof they haue two crosse lines, for the foure principall windes: the rest of the diuisions being reserued to the skill of their Pilots. Vpon which report of theirs, I made present triall howe a Magneticall Needle would stand in water, and found it to proue excellently well; not doubting but that many conclusions of importance in Marine affaires will thereby more readily be performed.
And in 1613, dramatist and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker refers to China dishes in his A Strange Horse-Race:
Yet would they serue this Banquet to the Table, neither in Plate, in Christall, in Chyna dishes, glasse or any other furniture, but in a Stuffe, deerer to them (and more deere to others) then any of the Mettals recited.
So, by the end of the first Elizabethan era, the word china was well established as a term for porcelain.
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. china n., Qin.
Barlow, William. The Nauigators Supply. London: G. Bishop, R. Newbery, and R. Barker, 1597. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Dekker, Thomas. A Strange Horse-Race. London: Nicholas Oakes for Joseph Hunt, 1613. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Federici, Cesare. The Voyage and Trauaile of M. Cæsar Frederick, Merchant of Venice, into the East India, the Indies, and Beyond the Indies. London: Richard Jones and Edward White, 1588, 6v–7r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Góis, Damião de. The Legacye or Embassate of the Great Emperour of Inde Prester Iohn, vnto Emanuell Kynge of Portyngale. London: W. Rastell, 1533, 21. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. China, n.1 and adj.
Photo credit: Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, public domain photo.