ETHNOLOGY, ETC., OF CHINA. 203 
REMARKS BY THE Rev. James Lecce 
(Professor of Chinese at Oxford University). 
I. As to the origin of the name China. There can be no doubt 
that this name originated in India, and came into general use 
through the employment of it by the Buddhist missionaries. Dr. 
Gordon says, on the first page, that the Buddhists of India called 
the land Chin-tan, or “The Dawn.” In Nien Ching’s History of 
Buddhism, he gives a conversation between Matangha, one, and 
probably the first, of the Buddhist missionaries, and the Emperor 
Ming, who first brought Buddhism to his country, as having taken 
place in A.D. 69. Their discourse having turned on a mysterious 
building in the capital, Matangha tells the Emperor that it was 
one of the nineteen places in the country of “China or Chin-tan” 
to which King As’oka had lent relics of Buddha. This is the 
earliest occurrence, so far as I know, of the name “China,” and 
Chin-tan, the synonym of it, means nothing about “the dawn.” 
It is merely a contracted form of the phonetisation ‘ China- 
sthana,” meaning “The Land of China.” It will remind many of 
a common termination of Sanscrit names of countries, such as 
Beloochistan, Afghanistan. 
How the Indians came to call the country “The Land of Chin ” 
we do not know. It may have been from the feudal state of 
Tsin, in the North West, which in B.C. 221, attained to the 
sovereginty of the whole country. The initial Ch instead of 7's’ 
is against this conclusion; but I need say no more on this point. 
There is the fact that the Buddhists called the Empire China in 
our first century, and this came gradually to be adopted by other 
countries generally, as Buddhism and its literature came to be 
known. 
I have said more than was necessary on this point, because it 
is an instance of what I consider certain errors which I could 
point out as lessening the value of Dr. Gordon’s paper; for 
example, the notion to which he alludes on p. 170, that the name 
was introduced into Europe, by Malay or Arabian traders, so 
recently as about A.D. 1500, from 7% ts’ing or T’di Ts’ing, the 
name of the present dynasty. Again, I do not agree with the 
quotation from Baron Bunsen on pp. 173-4, that “ the primitive 
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