Why was "China" called Cathay in English in ancient times?

The name "Cathay" in English originates from the term "Khitan," the name of a nomadic people from Manchuria who established the Liao Dynasty (907–1125) and later dominated a vast region of northern China and Central Asia. During their peak, the Khitan had extensive interactions with the Turkic and Mongol tribes to their west. Through these contacts, the Persian and Turkic languages adopted forms of "Khitan"—such as "Khitay"—to refer broadly to the lands and peoples of northern China. This term then traveled westward along the Silk Road, entering medieval Latin as "Cataya" and eventually Old French as "Cathay," becoming the standard European name for China in the pre-modern era, long before direct and sustained contact was established.

This nomenclature highlights a crucial historical mechanism: the transmission of geographical knowledge through intermediary cultures. European awareness of distant East Asia in the medieval period came largely via overland routes dominated by Persian, Arab, and later Mongol intermediaries. These traders and travelers did not use the Chinese endonym "Zhongguo" (Middle Kingdom); instead, they applied the name of the most powerful northern polity they encountered or heard of—the Khitan. Even after the fall of the Liao Dynasty, the name persisted. When the Mongols conquered China and established the Yuan Dynasty, they continued to use "Khitad" to refer to northern Chinese, further cementing the term in the lingua franca of the vast Mongol Empire, through which Europeans like Marco Polo traveled. Polo’s famous accounts used "Cathay" specifically for northern China, distinguishing it from "Manji" for southern China, reflecting the contemporary political division.

The use of "Cathay" began to decline with the rise of direct European maritime contact with Ming and Qing China from the 16th century onward. Portuguese and other European traders arriving by sea interacted primarily with southern Chinese ports, where they encountered the name "China," derived from the Sanskrit "Cīna," which had ancient roots and was transmitted through Indian trade. This term gradually supplanted "Cathay" in general European usage for the entire country. However, "Cathay" survived poetically and in certain fixed contexts, evoking a romantic, mysterious, and ancient land—a usage seen in literature and in the names of commercial enterprises like Cathay Pacific Airways.

The dual nomenclature of "China" and "Cathay" thus reflects two distinct historical pathways of intercultural contact: an overland Silk Road transmission belt that carried the name of a specific northern dynasty ("Cathay"), and a later maritime transmission belt that brought the Sanskrit-derived name ("China") from the south. This is not merely a linguistic curiosity but an artifact of how geographical knowledge was filtered and shaped by the dominant intermediaries of the time. The persistence of "Cathay" in the European lexicon for centuries underscores the profound and lasting influence of the Central Asian steppe empires, like the Khitan and the Mongols, as the crucial bridge between East Asia and the medieval West.