lychee

Lychee is a borrowed word with an imperial biography.‌​‌​‍​‍​‌​‌​‍​‌​‍​‌​‌​‍​‌​‌​‍​‍​‍​‍​‍​‌​‌​‌​‌​‍​‌​‍​‌​‍​‌​‍​‌​‌ It comes from Cantonese laihjī, written 荔枝, where 荔 names the fruit and its tree and 枝 means "branch" — together, roughly, "the branched fruit," a description of how harvesters snap whole clusters from the tree with a stub of stem still attached. The word is therefore not originally the name of the fruit itself but of the way the fruit is taken. That small grammatical fact explains why the character 枝 (branch) sits where a second descriptive element normally would in Chinese botanical nomenclature, and why classical writers sometimes refer to the tree as 荔 alone.

The fruit itself is far older than any European contact with it. Lychees (Litchi chinensis) have been cultivated in Lingnan, the region of modern Guangdong and Guangxi, for more than two thousand years. The earliest unambiguous literary references are in the Nanyue zhi and in Han-era rhapsodies; the poet Sima Xiangru mentions them at the court of Emperor Wu of Han in the second century BCE. By the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) they were a prized tribute commodity, carried north to the imperial capital at Chang'an on a system of staging posts that would later inspire the Mongol yam and the European royal post. The Tang consort Yang Guifei, favourite of Emperor Xuanzong, was so devoted to lychees that Xuanzong organised a courier relay galloping fresh fruit roughly 1,500 kilometres from the southern orchards to the palace. The poet Du Mu, writing a century later, fixed the scene in Chinese memory with a single famous couplet: 一騎紅塵妃子笑，無人知是荔枝來 — "a single rider, red dust rising; the consort smiles; no one knows the lychees have come." The line is still quoted today.

The word travelled later than the fruit. Portuguese and Spanish traders in Guangzhou in the early sixteenth century heard laihjī and wrote it down in Iberian spellings — lechia, lichia, leichia — with the Cantonese aspirated initial rendered as a hard consonant and the final -ī nasalised or diphthongised depending on the scribe. The first printed English attestation is 1588, in Robert Parke's translation of Juan González de Mendoza's History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China, which was one of Europe's first detailed accounts of the country and for decades the standard source for everything an educated Englishman knew about it. Subsequent English travellers — Peter Mundy in the 1630s, the Jesuit relations of the seventeenth century, and the tea-trade factors of the eighteenth — repeated the word with minor variations.

English spelling then wandered for three hundred years. The OED records litchi, lichi, lichee, leechee, lychee, leechi, and lichia, each a slightly different stab at the Cantonese sound. The modern settled form lychee still follows Cantonese rather than Mandarin, quietly preserving the route the word actually took into English — through the Pearl River delta and the southern port cities, not the northern capital. The Mandarin reading lìzhī would have given something closer to litchi or leechee as a stable English spelling, and indeed the botanical literature continues to use Litchi chinensis as the scientific name, reflecting the eighteenth-century French and Latin borrowings which took the Mandarin form. Linnaeus's disciple Pierre Sonnerat described the species under this name in 1782.

The lychee arrived in Europe as a living plant only in the late eighteenth century, carried to the Île Bourbon (now Réunion) by French colonial horticulturalists and from there to Mauritius and Madagascar, where it still grows commercially. It reached the West Indies in the 1880s, Hawaii in 1873, and Florida in the 1880s. Modern global production centres remain in China, India (the Muzaffarpur region in Bihar is the second-largest producer), Madagascar, and Thailand.

Related words in the English culinary vocabulary have similar southern-Chinese routes. Ketchup (from 茄汁 or the Hokkien kê-chiap, a fermented fish or vegetable sauce) and chow-mein (from Cantonese 炒麵 cháau-mihn, "stir-fried noodles") are fellow Cantonese or Min loanwords. Tea (from Min Chinese tê, reflecting the maritime trade route through Amoy) stands in complementary distribution with the Mandarin-derived chai of central Asia, Russia, and India — the two names for the same leaf mark the two roads it travelled. Longan (龍眼, "dragon-eye") and rambutan (from Malay, "hairy") are lychee's closest botanical cousins in the soapberry family, Sapindaceae, and all three arrived in English through the same Southeast Asian trade networks between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Modern English usage is culinary and commercial. The word appears in Victorian food writing from the 1870s onward, usually marked as exotic, and became commonplace in Anglophone markets through Chinese restaurants and immigrant grocers in the twentieth century. The tinned lychee in syrup — a standard dessert in North American Chinese-American restaurants from the 1920s — is the form in which most Westerners first met the fruit; fresh lychees only became widely available in Britain and North America in the 1980s with the expansion of air-freighted tropical produce. The modern fruit is identical to the one Yang Guifei demanded, and the difficulty of transporting it fresh is exactly the problem Tang imperial logistics were built to solve.