The common green magpie was described by the French polymath
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1775 in his
Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by
François-Nicolas Martinet in the ''Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle'' which was produced under the supervision of
Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist
Pieter Boddaert coined the
binomial name Coracias chinensis in his catalogue of the
Planches Enluminées. Buffon believed that his specimen had come from China but the species only occurs in the extreme south of the country. The
type locality was redesignated in 1952 by the German ornithologist
Erwin Stresemann as
Mergui,
Tanintharyi Region, Myanmar. The common green magpie is now one of four species that are placed in the
genus Cissa that was introduced by the German zoologist
Friedrich Boie in 1826 with the common green magpie as the
type species. The generic name is from the
Ancient Greek kissa meaning a "jay" or "magpie". The specific epithet
chinensis was chosen by Boddaert in the mistaken belief that the specimen illustrated by Martinet had come from China. Five
subspecies are recognised: •
C. c. chinensis (
Boddaert, 1783) – Himalayas to south China, north Indochina, Thailand and Myanmar •
C. c. klossi (Delacour & Jabouille, 1924) – central Indochina •
C. c. margaritae (Robinson &
Kloss, 1919) – Lang Bian Mountains (south Vietnam) •
C. c. robinsoni (
Ogilvie-Grant, 1906) –
Malay Peninsula •
C. c. minor (Cabanis, 1850) – Sumatra and Borneo ==References==