Charley - I don't understand your last point...

Why would the orthography used inside China have any bearing on what a piece of merchandise sold in Great Britain was known as....?

A commonly used medicinal compound was (and still may be) "Kaolin and morphine" - which I always beleieved was pronounced "Kayleen" - but I learned fairly recently that the Kaolin region in China produced a very fine clay which was used amongst other things for porcelain and was used in this mixture as a sort of suspension.

I have no idea how Kaolin is written in Mandarin or Cantonese... but it was adopted and adapted as part of the name of a standard product sold in the UK...

Happens a lot.. shampoo, bungalow, karaoke, algebra, slogan - all other-language (non-English) words adapted into English - sometimes with the meaning intact, somteimes not.

Cheers

Steven