[This is a guest post by Jichang Lulu]
The usual Chinese name for the Lena River is 勒拿河 Lèná hé. That's not a particularly felicitous transcription. Lèná rhymes with 圣赫勒拿 Shèng Hèlèná i.e. St Helena; it fails to reflect the palatalisation of the l in the Russian name. An alternative name transcribes the syllable ле with 列 liè, following the usual practice.
Lèná might not be particularly faithful to the Russian pronunciation, but at least it should immunise the Chinese public against the belief that Lenin 列宁 Lièníng named himself after the river. (The idea is widespread, but Lenin apparently was already using the pseudonym well before the events supposed to have motivated the choice.)
An earlier name is attested in Qing documents, namely 里雅那江 Lǐyǎnà jiāng. The name is not without historical significance: Langtan 郎坦, a Manchu official, began the negotiations that led to the treaty of Nerchinsk by claiming all territories up to the Lena river, something the Russians didn't appreciate. A Qing source that narrates the incident, the 1739 Baqi tongzhi chuji 八旗通志初集 or "First Edition of the History of the Eight Banners", uses the name Liyana in Chinese. I haven't been able to consult the Chinese original, but there's a Russian translation that shows that form the Chinese name (in its Pallady Cyrillisation лияна цзян)[1] (yes, that leads to a footnote; even blog posts can have footnotes).
The iya in Liyana makes the form look Manchu-mediated, and that's because it is. The talks at Nerchinsk were conducted in Latin through Jesuit interpreters, and the primary language of pretty much everyone in the Qing delegation (such as Songgotu (q.v. at Dartmouth), who signed the treaty, and indeed Langtan himself) was quite likely Manchu. So we would have Russian Лена Lena > (a Latinised form, oral or written) > Manchu Liyana > Chinese 里雅那 Lǐyǎnà.
The Lena river isn't mentioned in the text of the Nerchinsk treaty (because in the final agreement all its course ended up on the Russian side), but it appears in other Manchu documents. A Manchu map connected to the Nerchinsk negotiations is the "Map of the Nine Rivers of Jilin" (吉林九河圖), which does include the Lena. The map is reproduced on the website of Taiwan's National Palace Museum (國立故宮博物院); the Lena is visible on the upper left. Unfortunately the labels are unreadable at that resolution, but scholarship on Qing maps[2] confirms the Manchu name was indeed Liyana bira.
So the Manchu and Chinese name is transparently derived from Russian. While the name of the Lena river in Russian and Yakutian (a Turkic language spoken in the area) is assumed to be of ultimately Tungusic origin, the lack of a vowel before the 'l' means that the Manchus had to take it from the Russian rather than directly from, say, Yakutian or Evenki. Despite Langtan's vague claim that the Qing empire should extend all the way to the Lena because that's how far their state had reached in the past (unclear which state, and in which past), Qing officials weren't able to come up with a better Chinese or Manchu name for the river than a transcription of what the Russians called it.
That's relevant to a larger issue. Plenty of places in what is now Far Eastern Russia (though usually not so far inland) do have Chinese names, something many on both sides of the border are well aware of. Many non-Russian, often Chinese, toponyms in the Amur basin remained in common use more than a century after the Qing ceded a large swath of land to Russia at the Treaty of Aigun in 1858. China has denounced Aigun as an "unequal treaty" (不平等条约), and, although the Chinese government isn't claiming those lands back, anecdotal evidence suggests many in China feel they should have them. Those feelings are in turn seen with suspicion among some Russians now living in the region. Although a USSR Council of Ministers resolution Russified Far-Eastern toponyms wholesale in 1972, many of the older names remain in use among the local population.
An example I've written about is the location of the 'Tigre de Cristal' (水晶虎宫殿), the largest casino in Russia, opened a couple of months ago near Vladivostok to cater to a largely Chinese clientele. The casino is on a bay now officially called Muravyinaya (бухта Муравьиная; бухта is a loan from the German cognate of bight). Myrmecological though that sounds ('ants' cove'), the name is more likely to honour Count Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky than an insect infestation. It was Muravyov who signed the 'unequal' Aigun treaty on behalf of Russia, earning the lands Vladivostok now lies on for the Empire, and the comital title 'Amursky' for himself.
The name Muravyinaya is obviously not older than the Treaty of Aigun, and many locals keep using the older name, Tavayza Тавайза, said to come from Chinese Dawaizi (or Daweizi)[3]. In characters, that would be most likely 大崴子; 崴 wǎi and 崴子 wǎizi, attributed a range of meanings from 'mountain bend' (山湾) to 'bay', is common in place names in Jilin as well as across the border. The (older) Chinese name for Vladivostok is 海参崴 Hǎishēnwǎi; Posyet Bay (залив Посьета) used to be called 摩阔崴 Mókuòwǎi. There's also the idiom 跑崴子 pǎo wǎizi, originally meaning 'to go to Vladivostok' (to trade, possibly in sea cucumbers).
The word 崴(子), at least in this sense, seems in turn to be a Manchu loan. My ignorance of Manchu is appalling, but after rummaging through dictionaries and bilingual texts[4] I found a noun wai and a derived adjective waiku, also occurring (reduplicated?) in waiku daikū and meaning 'askew' (could that in turn be a loan from 歪 wāi?).
Tavayza or Dawaizi could be a more auspicious name for visitors to the new casino than the current official name, which points either to undesirable insects or to the even less desirable count who helped deprive China of those lands. (Dialectically enough, the loss of those lands to Russia has meant that Chinese people can now legally gamble on them.)
So while the abundance of Chinese toponyms is a vivid reminder of Qing rule beyond the Amur, the apparent lack of a non-Russian-mediated name for the Lena (or at least of one known to Qing officials) might deny one motivation to those inclined to formulate a historical claim further into Siberia. Some are indeed so inclined. While, as I said, such views aren't reflected in an official position, some people have tried to articulate the idea that much of Eastern Siberia had been under Chinese rule since time immemorial, with arguments not unlike those used to back Chinese territorial claims elsewhere. Qi Jun 齐钧 of the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has written an article[5] that defends the Qing claim to the lands up to the Lena (and indeed goes on to assert that China exerted "effective administration" over large swaths of Siberia as early as the Tang, and that Yuan explorers reached the Arctic).
The merits of such claims and their reception among Chinese academics go beyond the linguistic issues I wanted to bring up, so let me just say one more thing about the Lena river. It also has a Mongolian name, Зүлгэ Zülge (Buryat Зүлхэ). That looks quite different from the Russian and Tungusic names, and I have no idea where it might come from, or how early it might be attested. All I can say is it looks similar to the word зүлэг züleg (ǰülge in traditional script), meaning 'lawn' or 'turf'.
Here's my wildest speculation regarding the etymology of Зүлхэ Zülhe, the Buryat name of the Lena river. All I could say is that it looks similar to зүлэг züleg (traditional script ǰülge), which in (Khalkha) Mongolian means 'grass, lawn' and apparently also 'meadow'. (Buryat is a Mongolic language.)
It turns out that there are a number of words in Mongolic and Turkic languages of the shape jVlgV (with j a lenis affricate). A footnote to an article by Louis (Lajos) Ligeti* on the 'Phags pa script presents over a dozen such words, with meanings including 'meadow', 'lawn', 'ravine', 'valley crossed by a river', 'brook' (as well as 'district', which Ligeti argues comes from a different Mongolian etymon with a fortis initial).
Ligeti doesn't mention Buryat Zülhe as a river name. A 'grass' related meaning is present in several words with 'front' vowel harmony (Mongolian ǰülge belongs here), while in a few others we have the meaning 'ravine, gorge' and 'back' vowels. The back-group would seem semantically closer to rivers, but there are crossings between the two groups.
('Front' and 'back' are in scare quotes because the relevant opposition is not necessarily phonetically one of frontness in the languages involved.)
I don't know any Turkic, but googling around I found some such words I'm displaying suggestively here:
Mongolian жалга jalga (trad. ǰilaɣ-a): 'valley, ravine' (back vowel harmony)
Kyrgyz жылга jylga, similar examples in Kazakh and elsewhere in Turkic languages: meanings variously given as 'brook', 'ravine'… (mostly back; all loans from the Mn. above?)
Buryat Зүлхэ Zülhe 'name of the Lena river' (front)
Mongolian зүлэг züleg (trad. ǰülge) 'lawn, turf, meadow' (front)
So I don't know if (a) the words fall into two groups, with the Lena name related to the front-grass group; (b) the Lena name is related to the back-ravine group, but just switched to front vowels; (c) the Lena name has nothing to do with any of the other words; (d) all the words are related, or come from unrelated etyma but the semantics got mixed over time.
——*Ligeti L., "Trois notes sur l'écriture 'Phags-pa", Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (1961), pp. 201-237. JSTOR.
[1] Translated as "Биография Лантаня (Biography of Langtan)", in Davydova M., Myasnikov B., eds., Русско-китайские отношения в XVII веке. Материалы и документы (Russian-Chinese relations in the 17th century. Materials and documents), vol. 2. Moscow, Nauka, 1972. Available online. The Baqi tongzhi also has a Manchu version that had been translated into Russian before the Chinese one.
[2] Kicengge 承志, "尼布楚條約界碑圖的幻影—滿文《黑龍江流域圖》研究 (The illusion of the Nerchinsk treaty boundary-stone: The Map of the Amur Region in Manchu)", The National Palace Museum Research Quarterly vol. 29, no. 1 (Autumn, 2011), pp. 147-236. Online here.
[3] Solovyov F., Словарь китайских топонимов на территории советского Дальнего Востока (Dictionary of Chinese toponyms in the territory of the Soviet Far East). Vladivostok, 1975. Online here.
[4] An occurrence online claims to be from a modern edition of the Qingwen zhiyao 清文指要 or Manju gisun-i oyonggo jorin-i bithe, a Manchu-Chinese phrasebook whose first version seems to date to 1789. Waiku 'crooked' also occurs in the translation of the Book of the Nishan Shaman serialised in the Echoes of Manchu blog.
[5] Qi Jun 齐钧, "《尼布楚条约》所涉以雅库为界初考 (A preliminary study of 'Yaku as the border' alluded at the Treaty of Nerchinsk)", in Han Yanlong 韩延龙 ed., 法律史论集 (Studies on legal history), Beijing, 法律出版社, 2006. Available online in abridged form.