Litchi is only the second word from China to find its way into English. The first was China!
It appears in a translation of Juan González de Mendoza’s book The history of the great and mighty kingdom of China. After Marco Polo, this work is the second book about China published in the West. But Mendoza never went to China. All he did was to compile travel reports of various Spaniards who had been there. And in 1588 this work was translated by someone else who had not travelled to China, Robert Parke. Writing anything at this particular time was extremely political, especially if it related to travel or religion. In his book, Parke underlines just how important the spice trade is and offers his work as a guide for this travelling in the future to Japan, China and the Philippines.
In the book, he mentions “a kind of plums which they call lechias” which are not only extremely tasty but can be consumed in large numbers without any side effects. It took some time for the word to find its present spelling. Dampier was the first English-speaking person who saw and described the fruit which grows in South China. The British explorer who travelled round the world three times and introduced the words kumquat and chopsticks into English, also mentions the “lichea” which he described as a small reddish pear in 1699.
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