Reflections | Like Duterte, imperial China believed a country’s name conveyed a sense of national identity

In China, though, the country’s name (guohao) is serious business. In pre-modern times, when the state was ostensibly the personal property of the sovereign and his family, the name of the ruling dynasty was synonymous with the name of the country. A regime change always involved the replacement of the old dynastic name with a new one. The name Zhongguo, often translated as “Middle Kingdom”, was not used as an official name for the country. It was originally a geographical, and then later a cultural designation, used by the Chinese to differentiate themselves from the rest of the world.

Unlike most ruling houses in Europe, Chinese dynastic names were not family names. For example, the emperors of the Han dynasty were not surnamed Han but Liu, and the family name of Qing dynasty emperors was Aisin Gioro.

Early dynastic names were either those of the home regions of the founding rulers (Shang, Zhou and Qin), or the name of lands they controlled before they became emperors (the founding ruler of the Tang dynasty bore the hereditary title Duke of Tang, the first emperor of the Song dynasty used to be a military commissioner garrisoned in the Song prefecture).

The naming convention changed when the Mongols conquered China. Taking a line from the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, Kublai Khan named his Chinese dynasty Da Yuan, or the “Great Primal”, in 1271. After chasing the rulers of the “great primal dynasty” back to the Mongol steppes a mere 97 years later, Zhu Yuanzhang, an adherent of a Buddhist cult, named his new dynasty Da Ming, or the “Great Radiance”, after Ming Wang, the Chinese name for the Buddhist deities Vidyaraja (“Radiant Kings”).