Orient

• 1. Introduction

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  Orient is a word that has traveled farther than almost any traveler who ever used it. At its root, it comes from the Latin oriens, meaning "rising," borrowed from the daily fact of the sun climbing in the east. Across dozens of languages, that same instinct produced the same word: the Arabic mashriq from the verb meaning "to shine and rise," the Russian vostok from voskhod meaning "sunrise," the Greek anatole, the Armenian Arevelk, even the Japanese phrase "Land of the Rising Sun." Every culture oriented itself by the same sky. But Orient as a label for a region of the world is a stranger, slipperier thing. It started in Rome, moved through medieval Europe, stretched across centuries to reach the Pacific, and picked up political controversy along the way. By the time a Palestinian-American scholar named Edward Said published a book about it in 1978, the word had become a battlefield. How did a term for sunrise end up carrying so much weight?

• 2. Roots in Rome

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  Diocletian, who ruled the Roman Empire from 284 to 305, gave "the Orient" its first formal administrative shape. During his reign, the Diocese of the Orient was carved out as a distinct administrative unit, corresponding roughly to the region of Syria. The territory eventually grew into the Praetorian prefecture of the Orient, stretching across most of the Eastern Roman Empire from Thrace eastward. That original diocese sat at what Rome considered its eastern edge, and for centuries that edge held. Temples across the ancient world, including pagan temples, Hindu and Buddhist and Jain temples, and the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, were built with their main entrances facing east. Christian churches carried on that same orientation. East was not simply a direction; it was a gravitational pull. The opposite term, Occident, came from the Latin occidens, meaning "setting," drawn from the image of the sun falling in the west. Where Orient survived into modern usage, Occident faded. In English, "Western world" took its place, while Orient held on, evolving far beyond its Roman borders.

• 3. The Shifting Frontier

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  As European travelers pushed farther into Asia, the mental map of "the Orient" moved with them. What began as Egypt, the Levant, and neighboring areas as far west as Morocco gradually shifted east. During the 1800s, India and, to a lesser extent, China began to displace the Levant as the primary subject of Orientalist research. In 1869, Tolstoy's novel War and Peace has Napoleon looking at Moscow and calling it "That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy Moscow!" In 1843, the American historian William Prescott used the phrase "barbaric pomp, truly Oriental" to describe the court life of Aztec nobility in his history of the conquest of the Aztec Empire. Neither Moscow nor Mexico sits anywhere near what we now call East Asia. As late as 1957, Karl Wittfogel included Rome and the Incan Empire in his study of what he called Oriental Despotism. By the mid-20th century, Western scholars had narrowed the term to East Asia, Southeast Asia, and eastern Central Asia. The Orient Express train, which travelers can still board in Paris, runs to the European part of Istanbul, a route that was established in the early 20th century, and its name preserves the older, broader sense of the word: the East began at the edge of Europe and everything beyond was Orient.

• 4. Said and the Critique

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  Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978, and the book made the word itself a subject of argument. Said was a Palestinian-American scholar, and his argument was pointed: "Orientalism" described a pervasive Western tradition, both academic and artistic, of prejudiced outsider interpretations of the Arab and Muslim worlds, shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. The term "orientalist" had been, since the 19th century, the standard label for a scholar of Oriental studies. Artists, too, were already being called Orientalists in the 19th century, many of them drawing on travels to North Africa and Western Asia. Notably, when the Oxford English Dictionary looked for examples of "Orientalism" used to mean academic Oriental studies in English, it found only one, by Lord Byron in 1812. Said redirected the word away from scholarship and toward power. His book became influential and controversial in equal measure, and it pushed universities in several countries to rename Oriental studies as Asian Studies. The critique did not erase the term, but it forced anyone using it to reckon with what the word had been used to do.

• 5. Contemporary Fault Lines

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  John Kuo Wei Tchen, director of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute at New York University, traced the shift in American attitudes to the 1970s. He identified the anti-war movement of the 1960s and early 1970s as the moment when many Asian Americans began to connect the word "Oriental" to a Western process of racializing Asians as permanently foreign. In 2016, President Obama signed legislation introduced by New York Congresswoman Grace Meng, H.R. 4238, which replaced the word with "Asian American" in federal law. Washington State had already gone further, prohibiting "Oriental" in all legislation and government documents. In the United Kingdom, judges received guidelines to avoid the term because it is imprecise and may be considered racist or offensive. Yet the picture is uneven. In British English, Oriental remains a common name for Chinese takeaways and chip shops. In China, the word dongfang, translated as "oriental," appears in official English names including the Oriental Art Center and Oriental Movie Metropolis. Uruguay's full official name is the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, where "oriental" simply marks the country's location east of the Uruguay River, a usage that has carried on since the 18th century. Between 1830 and 1962, the French Army used the term tenue orientale for the distinctive indigenous uniforms of regiments recruited in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. In the carpet and rug trade, "Oriental" still covers pieces from Central Asia, South Asia, and Turkey.

• 6. Pearl and Morning Land

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  Orient carries one more meaning that has nothing to do with geography. It is also the word for the lustre of a fine pearl. Hong Kong, a former British colony, has been called "Pearl of the Orient," as has Shanghai. In German, the equivalent of Orient is sometimes Morgenland, a word that translates literally as "morning land," while its antonym Abendland, meaning "evening land," refers to Western Europe. Both are now mainly poetic, but the poetry encodes the same root idea: east is where light begins. The same logic produced mizrah in Hebrew, from the word for sunrise; sharq in Arabic, from the root meaning to rise and shine; and the Turkish dogu, from the verb doğmak, meaning to be born as well as to rise. A term that lawmakers in Washington State have struck from their statute books still structures the names that dozens of languages use for the direction where morning starts.