So in this world, China becomes known to the West as "Chuna" or something?
That's wrong. "Zhongguo", the most common Chinese name for China, means "Middle Kingdom" (or "Central State" or however you want to translate it). The word "China", however, is an anglicisation via Portuguese and various other languages of the name "Qin", hence what I was talking about.
Well, I don't know if China in English came from Portuguese, but I know there are references to
Cina (which thanks to the soft C in Sanskrit is pronounced . . . China) in Sanskrit and I think Persian, and I'm pretty sure that the term originated with Sanskrit and then went to Persia. Most people think that it refers to Qin, but that depends on how you date references to
Cina in the
Ramayana,
Mahabharata, and other Indian classics. If you go for the earliest dates thought for the first two, then it's unlikely that
Cina refers to Qin, which had not come into prominence yet. If you use later dates thought for the texts, then it becomes much more workable. In addition, other scholars think
Cina refers to Jing, the state as, wait for it . . . Chu. If that is the case, then China might remain around in everyday use as well! That last idea that I've heard that seems possible is that
Cina comes from the state of Yelang, formerly of Guizhou. The name Yelang comes from an ancient pronunciation of something that might have "Zina" in the original indigenous language.
The last idea is that
Cina comes from Sanskrit meaning "country of thought" or something like that, but nobody believes this anymore. I don't think that there were different Qins: there was always only one state of Qin in ancient times. I'll direct you guys to
http://sino-platonic.org/ and to issue #188 where Geoff Wade discusses the topic, so you can come to your own conclusions about whether he's right or not.