From Marco Polo’s Cathay to Matteo Ricci’s Sinae: Why China Is Called This Way

Abstract

The paper discusses the reasons that led to the identification of China in Europe as a country described by Venetian merchant Marco Polo under the name “Cathay” (formerly a silk-producing country, with which the Roman Empire indirectly traded). Based on the observa-tions and notes of travelers and diplomats, at the end of the 16th century the Jesuits put for-ward a hypothesis about the correspondence of the semi-mythical Kingdom of Prester John, Cathay and Sinae, as European travelers called southern Ming China. The task was solved by the Portuguese Jesuit traveler Bento de Góis (1562–1607), who, under the unlikely guise of an Armenian merchant, made a dangerous multi-stage journey from Indian Agra to Suzhou (in the Pamir part of the route, he became the only European traveler for more than half a thou-sand years between the expedition of Marco Polo and the explorers of the 19th century). In modern Xinjiang, de Góis, having talked to the Kashgarian merchants returning with a cara-van from China, was able to unequivocally correlate Jambala (Marco Polo’s Khanbalik) with Beijing, seeing a piece of paper with the Jesuits’ records. Making sure that the hypothesis of the Chinese Jesuits about the correspondence of Cathay to China was correct, de Góis set off again, but soon died of poisoning. The conclusion about the location and identification of Chi-na was finally made in Beijing by the leader of the Jesuit mission, Matteo Ricci, who correlated the information of de Góis, and the evidence of the Chinese Jew Ai Tian.