Not my first rodeo No 6: phrases borrowed from Chinese into English

I am repurposing a post I wrote 13 years ago on my lexicographer blog, but have added plenty to it, so feel less guilty about it:

The post is about words that are borrowed by English but from Chinese, which seems a very different non-European (and non-Indo-European) language to attempt theft from. But there are some things we took, and a lot of it comes back to the time when Britain was a huge colonial power, with 'possessions' all around the globe. I have a few favourite borrowings into English before mentioning the Chinese ones. Here are some:

bungalow: this is from the subcontinent. OUP has it thus: late 17th century: from Hindi baṅglā ‘belonging to Bengal’, from a type of cottage built for early European settlers in Bengal, and you can imagine the single story well-screened house with overhanging eaves and open veranda (oh, and you can guess which continent that word comes from too)

slogan: (one of my favourites), it basically started off as meaning a battle cry (early 16th century: from Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm, from sluagh ‘army’ + gairm ‘shout’.). I love the idea of Braveheart shouting "buy Toilet Duck - you know it makes sense!"

bus: The point here is that if you look at some mid-Victorian publications you will see it written as 'bus, to indicate that something has been dropped. It was originally 'omnibus' from the Latin 'for everyone', rather than a private coach.

And here is what I wrote about some surprising Chinese borrowings (aside from the less surprising 'char', as in "a nice cup o char' (slang for tea) from the Chinese 'cha', which means 'tea', and is written 茶.

What I'm talking about are not the obvious Chinese-sounding words like tofu and Feng Shui (which are indeed borrowed or imported from Chinese - hands up those who know that Feng Shui means 'Wind + Water')

What I'm interested in now is how many other English phrases and idioms are derived from Chinese by translation of the original Chinese words. There was after all a lot of contact between England and China from about 1800 onwards and there has been a continuous contact via the entrepôt of Hong Hong.

One example I had heard of was the phrase a 'look-see' (as in "I think I might just wander over there for a quick look-see"). This is apparently well-attested as being a translation (or 'calque' for the more linguistically-minded) of the Chinese phrase 看见 （kàn jiàn) which  means 'look-see'.

However I was very surprised to realise that the idiom 'to lose face' is also taken directly from Chinese. It seemed so comfortably English that I had never suspected it was an  interloper, but it seems that it was taken in the 19th century from the much older Chinese expressions regarding face. The usual Chinese phrase for 'lose face' is 丢面子 (diū miàn zi). The concept of 'face' is much richer in the Chinese language than in English and you can, for example, make a conscious effort to 'give someone face' by treating them as important or worthy in front of others.

If anyone knows of or suspects other loans of this type I'd be glad to hear.