Where the Word "China" Was First Written

China calls itself 中国 — Zhongguo, "the central country." Those two characters were written down for the first time in the valley where Luoyang stands, and the object they were written on still exists.

It is a bronze vessel known as the He zun (何尊), cast during the Western Zhou. Its inscription runs to 122 characters, and it is the earliest surviving object on which the characters 中国 appear.

Two Characters, Three Thousand Years Old

Bronze is where early Chinese writing was kept. On the ritual vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, inscriptions were part of the metal itself — cast or cut into an inner wall or the base of the vessel, not written on afterwards. They recorded offerings, military campaigns, royal appointments and gifts.

The Shang already put inscriptions on bronze. The Western Zhou is when those inscriptions grew long, and the He zun belongs to that moment. Roughly three thousand years after it was cast, its 122 characters carry the earliest surviving writing of the name China still uses for itself.

Bronze inscriptions matter because they were cast at the time rather than copied later. They can be read against the transmitted histories, and they sometimes correct them.

The vessel itself is of a type called a zun: a wine vessel with a wide mouth, a high neck and a ring foot — a form that reached its height in the Shang and Zhou.

"Zhai Zi Zhongguo"

The two characters sit inside a four-character phrase: 宅兹中国, zhai zi Zhongguo. Read one character at a time it says 宅 to reside, 兹 here, 中国 the central country — "reside here, in the central country."

The place it names is the Luoyang basin: the same ground on which the Western Zhou built its royal city in 1046 BCE.

The meaning of 中国 was narrower then than it is now. It did not name a country with borders. It named a position — the centre of the known world, the point from which the four directions were measured.

What survives is a single phrase on a single vessel. What it shows is that three thousand years ago, the people who built their capital here already called this place the centre.

A Chart from the River, a Book from the Luo

Two rivers run through Luoyang: the Yellow River and the Luo. Chinese tradition credits both with something older than writing.

The classical statement comes from the Book of Changes (Yijing), in its Xici commentary:

河出图，洛出书，圣人则之。

The River gave forth the chart; the Luo gave forth the book; the sages took them as their model.

The tradition attached to those two rivers — the Hetu Luoshu, the chart from the River and the book from the Luo — is not folklore that has faded out of the record. It is listed in China's national intangible cultural heritage inventory as item Ⅰ-135, added in the fourth batch in 2014, with Luoyang as the declaring area.

What the tradition holds is that a dragon-horse rose from the Yellow River carrying the chart on its back, and that the book came out of the Luo.

Where You Can Still Stand

Both rivers are still marked by places that can be visited.

North of the city, on the Yellow River, stands the Longma Foutu Temple — the temple of the dragon-horse carrying the chart. It dates to 348 CE.

Up the Luo River to the west, a stone stele marks the Luo chu shu chu — the place where the Luo gave forth the book. The stele was raised in 1724, the second year of the Yongzheng reign of the Qing dynasty.

The He zun is the written record. These two places are the landscape that goes with it: a chart from the Yellow River and a book from the Luo, both still marked, in the same valley where the name was first written down.

The Name That Stayed

中国 began as the name of a region — the central country around Luoyang. It is now the name of a country.

Luoyang's workshops have kept working across dynasty after dynasty. Bronze casting is still done in the city today, alongside ceramics, stonework and the rest of the crafts documented on this site.

That is the layer underneath every object made here. Three thousand years ago, in this valley, someone cast the name of China into a bronze vessel. The city still casts bronze.

Our about page sets out how we work with Luoyang's workshops. The bronze work itself is on our replica bronze page.