The story of a word
The Romanian word for “plate” comes from a title of China’s emperor
English named porcelain after the country it came from: china. Persian, Turkish, Russian and Romanian named it after the country’s ruler. In Persian, faghfūr was the title of the emperor of China, and faghfūrī, “the emperor’s”, was the name for choice Chinese vessels.
Ottoman Turkish turned that into farfuri, “porcelain”. Russian still calls porcelain farfor. In Romanian, farfurie is the everyday word for a plate.
Seven forms around the rim of a plate
The seven forms on the rim are all attested, each with its language, meaning and source. Between farfurie and 天子 the circle stays open: on Pelliot’s reading, only the meaning of the Chinese title was passed on. Transliterations differ from source to source: faghfūr, faγfūr and faḡfūr are the same word.
Form 1 of 7
天子tiānzǐ
Son of Heaven
The title of the Chinese sovereign, who rules by the mandate of Heaven. Paul Pelliot reads the Iranian title βaγpūr as a rendering of tiānzǐ: the meaning was translated, and no sound of the Chinese word was carried over.
The debate is an old one. Sylvain Lévi (1934) also linked to tiānzǐ the title of the Kushan kings of Central Asia and northern India, devaputra, “son of the gods”. Bazin-Foucher (1938) explained the Kushan title through the cult of kings in Iran. Pelliot replied that in Sogdian, and then in Arabic and Persian, the word turns up precisely for the emperor of China.
on Pelliot’s reading: meaning translated, no sound borrowed
Form 2 of 7
βγpwrβaγpūr
the emperor of China; literally “son of god”
The Sogdians came from the country around Samarkand, and many of them traded along the roads to China. In their language, an Iranian one, βaγ means “god” and pūr “son”. βγpwr gives the Sogdian spelling letter for letter; βaγpūr is the reading, with the vowels filled in.
In Parthian, a language related to Sogdian, baγpuhr has a single attestation known to Pelliot, as a name for Jesus: “Son of God”. In Sogdian the word names the emperor of China.
It occurs in a letter. In 1907 Aurel Stein found, in a watchtower west of Dunhuang, a bag of Sogdian letters written about 313 that never reached their destination. In the second, a merchant tells his partners in Samarkand that Luoyang, the capital, has burned. He calls the emperor βγpwr.
And, sirs, the last emperor, so they say, fled from Luoyang because of the famine, and fire was set to his palace and to the city.
attested borrowing
Form 3 of 7
بغبورbaγbūr
title of the emperor of China
Arab merchants who reached China by sea took over the Iranian title and explained it by the meaning of the Chinese one. The account of 851 attributed to the merchant Sulaymān says the emperor “is called with the title of baγbūr, which means Son of Heaven”.
A century later al-Masʿūdī repeats the explanation, and the author of the Fihrist, a catalogue of books, notes from information gathered in 966–967: “The meaning of baγbūr in Chinese is ‘son of heaven’.” The Iranian word is made of “god” and “son”; the Arab authors explain it by the Chinese title.
attested borrowing
Form 4 of 7
فغفورfaγfūr
the emperor of China
Persian took the word back from Arabic, with f. In Persian literature the rulers of China, called Čīn, sometimes bear this title; more often they are called ḵāqān.
Marco Polo renders Persian faγfūr as “Facfur” and treats it as the name of the king of “Manzi”, as southern China was then called: the Song emperor. Pelliot shows that the portrait blends at least three Song emperors. Polo never uses the word of the Mongol Qubilai.
An Arabic inscription at Quanzhou, dated 1323, speaks of events “in the time of the faγfūr”: that was enough to mean the Song period. Pelliot cites 15th- and 16th-century evidence that the title had gone out of use.
derived within the same language
Form 5 of 7
فغفوریfaγfūrī
of the emperor of China
The suffix -ī makes the adjective faγfūrī, “of the emperor of China”. In Bayhaqī’s account čīnī faγfūrī sets a select group of Chinese vessels apart from the rest of the gift; scholars read the distinction either as one of quality or as one of material.
The Persian chronicler Bayhaqī, writing in the 11th century, relates that the governor of Khorasan sent the caliph Harun al-Rashid (786–809) 20 pieces of čīnī faγfūrī, the like of which had never been seen at a caliph’s court, and some 2,000 other pieces. Pelliot explains the later sense: faγfūrī came to mean porcelain because it was the “[porcelain] of the faγfūr”.
“Imperial” here renders the old expression. It does not show that the vessels came from the Chinese court, and they may have been white stoneware, not porcelain (Hallett).
attested borrowing
Form 6 of 7
فغفوریfağfûrî · farfuri
porcelain
In Ottoman Turkish the adjective names the material. Redhouse’s lexicon (1890) gives the noun fağfur two senses, “the Emperor of China” and “porcelain”. The Turkish Language Society’s dictionary today defines it the same way: the title of the emperors of China, and porcelain objects made in China.
In speech fağfurî became farfuri. That popular form passed into the Slavic languages and Romanian; Pelliot adds the Greek word to them.
attested borrowing
Form 7 of 7
farfurie
porcelain, then plate
The standard Romanian dictionary, DEX, derives it “from Turkish farfuri (literary fağfuri), modern Greek farfuri”. At first the word named the material. The Moldavian chronicler Ion Neculce describes a precious cup as looking like “white marble and farfurie”, that is, like porcelain.
The word then came to name the dish one eats from. A text of 1779 mentions food served “in dishes of pure gold and in farfurii de China”, plates of China-ware.
The Chinese province that never existed
Several dictionaries also explain faghfur as the name of a region of China famous for porcelain. There was no such region. The explanation passed from dictionary to dictionary until Paul Pelliot looked for its source.
What the dictionaries copied
…a place in China celebrated for its porcelain; the porcelain of China.
…d. fagfur, împăratu Chineĭ, o provincie chineză renumită pin porțelan…
“…from fagfur, the emperor of China, a Chinese province renowned for porcelain…”
What Pelliot found
But it is sheer nonsense. There never was any region really called Faγfūr in China.
Pelliot looks for the source of the error. Berneker had the explanation from Vullers, who found it in a Persian source; Vasmer took it from Berneker into his etymological dictionary of Russian. The oldest trace is in the Ottoman admiral Sidi Ali Çelebi, in 1554, who claimed that the best porcelain was to be found “at Šahr-i-naw and at Faγfūr”. The title had gone out of use, and a word no longer understood was taken for a place.
Pelliot explains the sense differently: faγfūrī meant “of the emperor of China”, hence “the emperor’s porcelain”.
A dictionary also preserves the mistakes of the dictionaries before it.
Where the word turns up, and how the vessels travelled
The word turns up in a Sogdian letter, Arabic accounts, a Persian chronicle, Ottoman dictionaries and the writings of a Moldavian chronicler. The vessels travelled mostly by sea, tens of thousands to a single ship.
天子
The capital where the Son of Heaven reigned at the start of the 4th century; the Sogdian merchant writes of its burning.
c. 313
West of the town, in a watchtower, Aurel Stein found the Sogdian Ancient Letters in 1907. The second was addressed to Samarkand.
βaγpūr
The heart of Sogdiana. The merchant’s letter was meant to arrive here.
c. 800
The gift to Harun al-Rashid. Bayhaqī calls the vessels čīnī faγfūrī.
1323
An Arabic inscription in the great Chinese port dates events “in the time of the faγfūr”, meaning under the Song.
fağfûrî
At the Ottoman court the word names porcelain. The spoken form, farfuri, passes into Russian and Romanian.
farfurie
Ion Neculce, a Moldavian chronicler, compares a precious cup to white marble and to “farfurie”, porcelain.
8th–9th centuries
White ware from northern China, admired in Baghdad. Hallett suggests the gift to Harun included vessels from the Xing or Ding kilns.
9th century
An Arab ship wrecked off Belitung island carried about 60,000 objects, almost all of them ceramic vessels.
9th–10th centuries
The Persian Gulf ports through which Chinese goods entered the caliphate and went up to Baghdad.
13th–15th centuries
The Red Sea and Mamluk Egypt: another gate to the Mediterranean. There was no single porcelain road.
from the 14th century
The city of the Ming and Qing imperial kilns. The blue-and-white of the Topkapı collection was made here (Tufan); the word faγfūrī is several centuries older.
15th–19th centuries
The sultans’ palace keeps, according to Tufan, the largest collection of Chinese porcelain outside China: about 12,000 pieces.
twenty pieces of imperial China-ware (chini faghfuri)… the like of which had never been seen at a Caliph's court before
Where the vessels ended up: 12,000 pieces in Istanbul
Topkapı Palace, the residence of the Ottoman sultans, keeps what Ömür Tufan describes as the largest collection of Chinese porcelain outside China. The sultans gathered it over four centuries, from gifts, booty and purchases, and from the estates of dignitaries who died or were dismissed, which the treasury took over.
- ~12,000
- Chinese pieces, chiefly of the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties (Tufan 2024)
- 40
- Yuan blue-and-white vessels, according to Tufan’s study
- 20,611
- porcelain pieces entered in the registers, 16th–18th centuries, as coming from dignitaries’ estates
Regina Krahl published the complete catalogue in 1986, in three volumes: more than 10,000 pieces. Almost half are blue-and-white. Ömür Tufan’s 2024 study gives about 12,000 pieces. The figure of 20,611 is the total recorded across three centuries, not the number of pieces kept today.
A document of 1514 mentions porcelain taken by Sultan Selim from the Hasht Bihisht palace at Tabriz, without saying how many pieces. The palace registers call Chinese vessels fağfur and fağfurî.
On the base of the imperial dish, the reign is written
Many vessels made at Jingdezhen for the Ming court carry a mark on the base: the name of the reign period. The mark below has six characters and is read downwards, the right-hand column first.
- 大 dà great
- 明 Míng Ming [dynasty]
- 宣 Xuān Xuan-
- 德 dé -de: Xuande, the reign period 1426–1435
- 年 nián years
- 製 zhì made
“Made in the Xuande years of the Great Ming.”
The mark names the reign period, Xuande, and not the emperor’s own name. Nor does it guarantee the date: later vessels often carry the marks of earlier reigns. The Romanian word keeps something else: the title that foreigners gave the emperor of China.
Jingdezhen also made vessels with Arabic and Persian inscriptions. The vase below, of the Zhengde period (1506–1521), has Persian inscriptions and, on its base, the Chinese reign mark.
One material, four names
The European words discussed here name porcelain after a ruler, a shell or a country. Chinese calls it something else.
farfurie · фарфор
after the emperor
On Pelliot’s account the Turkish, Greek, Russian and Romanian words all start from Persian faγfūrī, “of the emperor of China”. In Russian, farfor is still the word for porcelain.
porcelain · porțelan
after a shell
Italians called the glossy, rounded cowrie shell porcellana, “little sow”. Marco Polo, in 1298, uses the word both for the shells used as money and for vessels: “escuelle de porcellaine”. English has porcelain from the 1530s; Romanian porțelan comes from French.
china
after the country
English shortened it: China dishes in the 1570s, China-ware in the 1630s, china from the 1650s. Persian had done the same with čīnī, “Chinese”; Turkish çini came to mean the glazed tiles of İznik.
瓷 cí
the Chinese name
In Chinese the word has nothing to do with the emperor or the country. The dictionary Shuowen jiezi explains the character 瓷 as “a vessel of fired clay; from 瓦, with the sound of 次”. The lower part, 瓦, gives the meaning; 次, above it, the pronunciation.
Related forms in other languages, and what they mean
Pelliot traces the Greek, Slavic and Romanian words for porcelain to the Turkish form; for the Greek word the Triantafyllidis dictionary gives a different etymology. Armenian keeps the emperor’s title by a separate route.
| Form | Language | Meaning today |
|---|---|---|
| fağfur | Turkish | title of the emperors of China; porcelain objects made in China TDK |
| φαρφουρί | Greek | fine porcelain; obsolete Triantafyllidis; Pelliot |
| фарфор | Russian | porcelain, the everyday word; attested from 1724 Vasmer |
| фарфор | Bulgarian | porcelain; obsolete Rechnik na bălgarskiya ezik |
| farfuri | Albanian | porcelain and objects made of it Fjalor i gjuhës shqipe |
| farfura | Polish | faience, a faience vessel; archaic SJP PWN |
| Čenbakur | Armenian | “faγfūr of China”, the emperor’s title; the Orbelian family took the clan name Čenbakurian from it Pelliot |
| farfurie | Romanian | plate; archaic, porcelain DEX |
In Romanian: from the material to the dish on the table
The dictionary documents the older sense with a passage from Ion Neculce’s O samă de cuvinte, a collection of historical legends compiled in the 18th century.
What does “farfurie” mean in Neculce’s sentence?
…un păhar, ce ziceau călugării la mănăstire că iaste de iaspis, ce era în chipul marmurii albe și al farfurii…
“…a cup, which the monks at the monastery said was of jasper, and which looked like white marble and like farfurie…”
Porcelain. The cup looked like white marble and like porcelain; the edition’s glossary explains “farfurie: porcelain, faience”. Neculce (1672–1745) is writing about the gifts of Stephen the Great, prince of Moldavia, to Putna Monastery.
DEX keeps the sense, marked “archaic”: porcelain. In 1939 Scriban’s dictionary records the literary form fagfuri beside the popular farfuri, and the relatives around it: Albanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Polish, Greek.
In the 20th century farfurie also entered the expression farfurie zburătoare, literally “flying plate”, calqued on English flying saucer. Chinese says the same: 飞碟, fēidié, literally “flying saucer”.
Sources
The label shows the kind of evidence.
The word
- PHILOLOGY Paul Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, II, note 227 “Facfur”, pp. 652–661 The etymology; the Arabic attestations of 851 and 966–967; Polo and the Quanzhou inscription; the invented province; “the porcelain of the faγfūr”.
- ENCYCLOPAEDIA Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Chinese-Iranian Relations x” faḡfūr from Sogdian βaγpūr; faḡfūrī, “imperial”, of painted porcelain.
- ENCYCLOPAEDIA Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, “Faghfūr”, vol. II, p. 738 The title in Muslim sources; faghfūrī and fağfur as names for Chinese porcelain.
- HISTORICAL TEXT The Sogdian Ancient Letters, translated by Nicholas Sims-Williams Letter 2: the emperor’s flight and the burning of Luoyang.
- DICTIONARY B. Gharib, Sogdian Dictionary, 1995, no. 2582 βγpwr, with a reference to Ancient Letter 2.
- ENCYCLOPAEDIA Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Ancient Letters” The date of the letters: 312–313, after W. B. Henning.
- DICTIONARY Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian–English Dictionary, 1892, p. 934 The definition with “a place in China”.
- DICTIONARY Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon, 1890 fağfur: the Emperor of China; porcelain.
- DICTIONARY Türk Dil Kurumu, Güncel Türkçe Sözlük: fağfur, fağfurî The two senses today.
- DICTIONARY Vasmer, etymological dictionary of Russian: фарфор The 1724 attestation; the Ukrainian and Polish forms.
- DICTIONARY Słownik języka polskiego PWN: farfura The Polish sense: faience.
- ENCYCLOPAEDIA Britannica, “Tian” Tiānzǐ and the mandate of Heaven.
- DICTIONARY Triantafyllidis: φαρφουρί The Greek, Bulgarian and Albanian senses. Triantafyllidis gives the Greek word a different etymology.
- DICTIONARY Rechnik na bălgarskija ezik (chitanka.info): фарфор The Bulgarian sense: porcelain, obsolete.
- DICTIONARY Fjalor i gjuhës shqipe (fjale.al): farfuri The Albanian sense: porcelain and objects made of it.
- STUDY Chen Chunxiao, “Appellations of China in Medieval Muslim Literature”, The Silk Road 18 (2020) Faghfūr and Baghbūr in Muslim sources, and how Chinese scholarship renders them.
The vessels
- STUDY Jessica Hallett, “Pearl Cups Like the Moon”, in Shipwrecked (Smithsonian, 2011) The gift to Harun al-Rashid; Tang white ware; the Belitung cargo.
- STUDY John Guy, “Rare and Strange Goods”, in Shipwrecked (Smithsonian, 2011) Belitung: some 60,000 objects, 98 per cent ceramics.
- STUDY Ömür Tufan, Millî Saraylar 26 (2024) The Topkapı collection: counts, routes of acquisition, the 1514 document.
- CATALOGUE Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics in the Topkapi Saray Museum, 3 vols, 1986 The complete catalogue of the collection.
- MUSEUM The Cleveland Museum of Art: dish with Xuande mark (1989.285) The six-character mark.
- MUSEUM The Cleveland Museum of Art: Zhengde vase with Persian inscriptions (1964.170) The Persian inscriptions; the Zhengde mark.
- MUSEUM Victoria and Albert Museum, notes on reign marks The practice of reign marks begins in the Ming; later wares with earlier marks.
In Romanian
- DICTIONARY dexonline: farfurie (DEX, Scriban, DLRLV) The etymology; the archaic sense; “farfurii de China”, 1779.
- HISTORICAL TEXT Ion Neculce, Opere, Minerva edition, 1982 The passage with the jasper cup, and the edition’s glossary.
- STUDY Greavu, on calques, 2004 “Farfurie zburătoare”, after flying saucer.
The other names
- DICTIONARY Hobson-Jobson, 1903: Porcelain Porcellana, the shell; the quotations from Marco Polo.
- DICTIONARY Etymonline: china The English dates.
- DICTIONARY Etymonline: porcelain English porcelain, from the 1530s.
- DICTIONARY Shuowen jiezi: 瓷 (via 漢典) “瓦器。从瓦次聲。”
- STUDY 汤景根, “China并非源于‘昌南’”, 江西社会科学, 1993, no. 3 Rejects the Changnan etymology.
- DICTIONARY Ministry of Education dictionary, Taiwan: 飛碟 The Chinese word for a flying saucer.
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