Why China is called Cathay in Russian

The strange history of country names

Country names feel natural and final, as if they had always been that way. China is China, Germany is Germany, Japan is Japan. But look a little closer, and the map of the world becomes a vast museum of historical misunderstandings, ancient tribes, foreign rumours, trade routes, linguistic distortions and political memory. Very often, a country is not called by the name its own people use, but by a name once given to it by neighbours, conquerors, merchants or travellers.

Imagine a strange scene: on April 1, let us say in the year 1373, a special committee gathers to discuss a problem. Far to the east, beyond the Mongol lands, there is a vast country. We need to call it something. How about Kitai, because the word sounds beautiful? Of course, nothing like this happened. Country names rarely appear by decision of a single office. More often, they accumulate in layers, pass from language to language, lose their original meaning and begin a life of their own.

This is exactly what happened with China in Russian. The Russian word Kitai is connected not with the name traditionally used by the Chinese themselves, and not even with the whole territory of modern China. Its path begins in the north, with the Khitan people, who in the tenth to twelfth centuries created the Liao state in northern China. Later, through neighbouring peoples and through Mongolic and Turkic languages, this name came to designate Chinese lands in various forms: Kitai, Khitai, Cathay, Khitan.

In the European tradition, the word Cathay long existed as a poetic and almost legendary name for China, especially northern China. It comes from the Khitans. In Russian, Kitai became established through eastern and Central Asian intermediaries. The paradox is clear: the country was named after a people who ruled only part of its territory and, by the time the name became fixed, had long disappeared from the main historical stage.

In English and many other European languages, another name became dominant: China. It is usually connected with the ancient Qin dynasty, which unified Chinese lands in the third century BCE and gave the world one of the most recognizable external names for the country. The same root is behind forms such as Latin Sina and the adjective Sino-, familiar from terms like Sino-Tibetan or Sino-American.

The Chinese themselves use a different name for their country: Zhōngguó, usually translated as “Middle Kingdom” or “Central State.” This name reflects not the geographic precision of a modern map, but an ancient idea of a civilizational centre around which the known world was organized. In this one example, we already see three different logics: an internal name rooted in worldview; the Russian name that came through the Khitans; and the Western China, linked to the Qin dynasty.

Such inconsistencies are not errors of history. They are history’s normal condition. Countries rarely have only one name. They have an endonym - the name used by their own people - and an exonym - the name used by outsiders. Sometimes these names are almost the same. More often, they tell completely different stories.

Germany: a country with dozens of names

Germany is one of the best examples of how different neighbours can see the same country differently. Germans call their country Deutschland and their language Deutsch. This root goes back to an old word meaning “of the people” or “popular.” Many names for Germany and the German language in Germanic and other languages come from this source.

But not all neighbours called the Germans what they called themselves. Roman and Latin tradition preserved the form Germania. The French Allemagne comes from the Alemanni tribe. Finnish Saksa is connected with the Saxons. In Slavic languages, forms such as nemtsy, Niemcy and Německo are widespread and are usually linked to the idea of “mute” or “not understandable,” meaning people whose speech the Slavs did not understand.

So one country received several major families of names: Deutsch, German, Aleman, Saxon and Nemets. Each of them is not merely a word, but a trace of which people a particular neighbour encountered and what it remembered.

The Netherlands: why Dutch is not Deutsch

The word Dutch in English can be confusing because it looks so similar to Deutsch. Historically, this is no accident. In the Middle Ages, the borders between Germanic languages and peoples were much less clear than they are today. Dutch was perceived as part of the Low German linguistic area, and the word Dutch could refer more broadly to people speaking Germanic dialects.

This is also the source of the expression Pennsylvania Dutch: they are not Dutch from the Netherlands, but descendants of German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania. Their name preserves the older, broader use of the word Dutch.

There is another familiar confusion: Holland and the Netherlands. Holland is not the entire country, but a historical region associated mainly with two provinces: North Holland and South Holland. Much of the country’s trading, maritime and urban power came from there, so outside observers often applied the name Holland to the whole Netherlands. Today, the official and more accurate form is the Netherlands, especially when referring to the country as a whole.

India: a river, an empire and Bharat

The name India is connected with the Indus River. Its ancient name goes back to the Sanskrit Sindhu. Through Old Persian pronunciation and Greek tradition, this became Indos and India. For the outside world, India was long the land beyond the Indus, a vast space east of familiar borders.

Inside the country, however, another important name exists: Bharat. It is used in the official name of India alongside India and is connected with ancient cultural and mytho-historical tradition. Bharat is not simply an alternative word, but a name carrying its own civilizational memory.

There is also Hindustan, a name historically used for northern India and carrying different political and cultural meanings at different times. Once again, one country has several names, each looking at it from a different angle: through a river, through ancient epic tradition, through Persian-Islamic geography and through modern statehood.

Japan: the land of the rising sun and the route through China

The Japanese call their country Nippon or Nihon. Both forms are written with the same characters and are usually translated as “origin of the sun” or “land of the rising sun.” This name is connected with Japan’s position to the east of China: from there, the sun rises.

Why, then, does almost the whole world say Japan? European forms of the word travelled a complicated path through Chinese readings, trade contacts and travellers’ accounts. In medieval Europe, thanks to Marco Polo, the form Cipangu or Zipangu became known. Later, through Portuguese and other European contacts, variants appeared that eventually became Japan, Japon, Giappone and other familiar forms.

Again we see the typical pattern: the internal name speaks about the country’s place in its own cultural imagination, while the external name preserves traces of foreign pronunciation, trade and distant stories.

Korea: a dynasty that survived in a name

Today, the Korean Peninsula is home to two states, and they use different names for the country as a whole. In North Korea, the name Chosŏn is used; in South Korea, Hanguk. Both words carry deep historical and cultural meaning.

The external name Korea comes from the Goryeo dynasty, which ruled the Korean Peninsula in the Middle Ages. It was this state that merchants and travellers encountered, and its name became the international designation for the country. The dynasty is long gone and the political map has changed, but the name continues to live in the languages of the world.

Finland: Suomi inside and Finland outside

Finland is another example of a country that the world mostly calls by a name different from the one used by its own people. In Finnish, the country is Suomi, and the language is also suomi. The origin of the word is debated, but it is the country’s central internal name.

The name Finland came through the Swedish tradition. This is not surprising: Finland was under Swedish rule for centuries, and Swedish remains one of the country’s official languages. As a result, the external name became established in most world languages through Swedish and the broader European geographic tradition.

Once again, the map reminds us that political history often proves stronger than internal self-naming. For Finns, the country is Suomi. For most of the world, it is Finland.

England: Angles, Saxons and Celtic memory

The name England means “land of the Angles.” The Angles were one of the Germanic peoples who moved to the British Isles in the early Middle Ages, together with the Saxons and other groups. From them came the familiar English and England.

But Celtic languages often preserved a different memory. In Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Breton, names for England are connected not with the Angles, but with the Saxons. For the neighbouring Celts, the Saxons became one of the main labels for the newcomers who occupied much of the island.

The irony is that the root connected with the Saxons can, in other languages, refer not to England but to Germany: Finnish Saksa and Estonian Saksamaa name Germany after the Saxons, who originally came from Germanic lands. The same historical tribes left traces in very different names at different edges of Europe.

Why this matters

Country names are not dry reference facts. They are small historical capsules. Hidden inside them are merchants’ routes, neighbours’ fears, memories of tribes, imperial ambitions, travellers’ mistakes, ancient rivers, forgotten dynasties and foreign attempts to pronounce unfamiliar words.

Kitai, China and Zhōngguó are not three random versions of one name, but three different stories of one civilization. Deutschland, Germany, Allemagne and Niemcy are not simply translations, but a map of other peoples’ encounters with the German world. Japan and Nippon, India and Bharat, Finland and Suomi show that between how a country sees itself and how others see it, there often lie centuries of history.

That is why geography becomes far more interesting when we look at it not only as a map of borders, but as a map of words. A country’s name is the first thing we say when we speak about it. But behind that word there is almost always not one meaning, but a long road: through languages, wars, trade, myths and the memory of peoples.