The word "China" has been used in English since the 16th century. China was previously known to Europeans as
Cathay, as used in
Marco Polo's book on
his travels in the 13th century (during the
Yuan dynasty), and it took a while for most Europeans to be convinced that Cathay referred to China or
North China. The term "Chinese Empire" first appeared in the 16th century (late
Ming dynasty), and its usage increased during the following
Qing dynasty.
Qing dynasty With the
transition from Ming to Qing, Europeans began to apply the name "Chinese Empire" to the
Qing dynasty (1644–1912). In the 1689
Treaty of Nerchinsk, the authoritative
Latin text used the name "Imperii Sinici" (meaning "Chinese Empire") to refer to the Qing realm.
George Macartney, the first envoy of
Great Britain to China in 1793, had famously said "the Empire of China is an old, crazy, first-rate Man of War, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers have contrived to keep afloat for these hundred and fifty years past..." shortly after
his mission to China. While the Qing dynasty tried to maintain the traditional
Chinese tributary system, by the second half of the 19th century it had become part of a European-style community of
sovereign states. In the process, Qing dynasty's geographical boundaries were redefined by western powers and Japan through diplomacy and warfare. The Qing administration made an effort to effectively manage its borders while
modernizing itself, and its dependencies in
Inner Asia (collectively known as
Chinese Tartary at that time) were internalized and integrated into China's imperial dominion as accepted by the western countries. Throughout the 19th century, western cartographers commonly included
Manchuria,
Mongolia,
Xinjiang (
Chinese Turkestan), and
Tibet, along with
China proper separated by lines, as part of the "Chinese Empire" in published maps. In the last decade of the Qing dynasty, maps published in China caught up with Western cartography, and China's Inner Asian frontiers were enclosed by fixed international boundaries and not separated from China proper by special demarcations.
Continuous or separate empire(s) While the term "Chinese Empire" may be used to specifically mean the Ming or the Qing dynasties during the existence of these dynasties, it was often used in a sense to refer to a continuous empire ruled by various dynasties in Chinese history, as the traditional
Chinese historiography conceives its history in terms of an unbroken sequence of dynasties (see
dynastic cycle). For example, when
Juan González de Mendoza talked about ancient China in his work in the late 16th century, he clearly stated in three places that the first (mythical) sovereign of China, the
Yellow Emperor, made the Chinese kingdom an empire; since China was already an empire during the time of the Yellow Emperor, all dynasties from then on were regarded as the continuation of the "empire". According to
Matteo Ricci's view of "imperial power transfer", the name of the empire had not changed since ancient times, but it often had other names due to different ruling families; for instance, the name of "German Empire" would never change, but when the Austrian family ruled, it could also be called "Austrian Empire". On the other hand, modern scholars usually consider the imperial dynasties separate states or empires rather than a single continuous empire, especially since the end of Imperial China. Meanwhile, the English term "Emperor" nowadays generally corresponds to the Chinese term
Huangdi (皇帝), also referred to as
Emperor of China. For example, the
Qin dynasty, which was the first to use the title Emperor or
Huangdi, has been referred to as "the first Chinese Empire" in modern sources. On the other hand, the Qing dynasty is regarded as the last Chinese Empire. The dynasties in between them are similarly regarded as empires instead of a single continuous empire, and terms such as "
Sui-Tang transition" and "
Ming-Qing transition" were introduced in the second half of the 20th century to highlight the changes during transitions of these periods, While imperial dynasties are no longer considered a single empire, some dynasties may be grouped together by some scholars, such as the Qin and the
Han dynasty that followed, collectively called the "Qin-Han Empire" by some researchers. Taken together, these two dynasties constitute the "classical" era of
Chinese civilization, as did the
Greeks and
Romans in the West. ==General history==