Christianity reached China in its Syriac guise in the seventh century. Christian documents written in Chinese which have come down to us from the period of the Tang Dynasty contain a large number of proper names which are, or appear to be, transcriptions of Syriac names. In this paper, originally published in Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock, the author provides a list of the transcribed proper names with their modern and reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciations, together with the suggestions made by scholars in the past for the original forms of these names.

Hidemi Takahashi holds degrees in Classical and Oriental Studies from the Universities of St. Andrews (M.A.), Tokyo (M.Litt.) and Frankfurt (Dr. phil.) and is currently associate professor in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo. His publications include Aristotelian Meteorology in Syriac. Barhebraeus, Butyrum sapientiae, Books of Mineralogy and Meteorology (Leiden: Brill, 2004) and Barhebraeus: A Bio-Bibliography (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2005).