I believe every Chinese of us is proud of our motherland's prosperity and growing strength. Then, as a Chinese, do you know the origin of the name "China"? Our great and dear motherland, why should we call it "China"? It has a long history.
The emergence of the word "China" has a long history. Some scholars believe that it should have originated from Oracle Bone Inscriptions in the Yin and Shang Dynasties. The "China" mentioned here is not the name of a country, but an adjective used by the ancestors to express geographical location. At that time, the ancients believed that the earth we live on was composed of heaven and earth. The sky was above and the earth was below, the sky was round and the earth was square. The sky above was shrouded in a square earth, which was called "under the whole world" for short. The sea is the most common place in the East, West, North and south, which is called the "Four Seas". The world is within the four seas, referred to as "within the sea". The central point of the earth in all directions is "in the world", and the cities and regimes built there are called "China".
The earliest documentary or cultural evidence of the word "China" can be found is the inscription on "he Zun" unearthed in Jiacun, Baoji, Shaanxi Province in 1963. The finished product was about the early Western Zhou Dynasty. According to the inscription, only the king of Wu conquered the merchants of Dayi, and the court told Yu Tian, "I live in China, and I create my own people." The main idea of this inscription is that King Wu has destroyed the Shang state, and after the destruction of the Shang state, he prayed to heaven: I will take this place as the center of the world and rule my people well. Obviously, the "China" here refers to Luoyang, the "center of the world" at that time and the seat of the imperial court. It can be seen that during the period of King Wu of Zhou and his son king Cheng of Zhou, the word "China" was indeed used ("or" is "country").
Although there is no consensus in academic circles about the exact time when King Wu of Zhou destroyed Shang Dynasty, it is generally believed that it was in the 11th century BC. That is to say, the word "China" has been used for at least 3000 years. The inscription on he Zun is used to explain the legitimacy of the Zhou Dynasty to heaven. And the "China" here is generally believed to be Luoyang and other central plains and other areas around Beijing and the capital. The initial concept of "state" is the place where the emperor and the princes live and the surrounding adjacent areas. In contrast, some further ruled places are called "wild", so "China" is the seat of the central monarch. Later, with the decline of Zhou Tianzi's authority and the rise of local princes, the concept of state began to overflow, regardless of the state and the wild, "state" began to be used to refer to the regime and people in a geographical region.
It can be seen that "China" at this time is only a geographical concept, and the concept that can represent China's nationality is "Huaxia", which takes the Central Plains as the center and radiates all around, and can be divided into northern Di, Southern man, Eastern Yi and Western Rong. Qin Shihuang unified the "whole world", especially after the southern region was brought into centralized rule, the word "China" expanded to further regions in the geographical concept, and thus had a broader meaning of politics, economy, culture, military and other aspects. From the earliest refers only to the Western Zhou Dynasty capital (today's Luoyang) region, and later evolved into the Yellow River Basin and the Central Plains region in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, and then to the unified and expanded territory of the Qin Dynasty, the so-called "the son of heaven has the Tao, guarding the four barbarians", and the concept of "China" is constantly expanding. In the Han Dynasty, the barbarian Qiu was founded, and the Chinese character cultural circle was formally formed, and the concept of "China" as a country name also basically formed a preliminary concept