The Forbidden East (and other locales).

[SolemnGolem]

"Shansin" could well be a Westernized recording of a Chinese phrase.

The prefix "Shan-" is a very common place name in China, as 山 shan means mountain. (It's in plenty of province names.) The other province character 陕 shan means a mountain pass - sometimes transliterated as Shaan to prevent confusion.

The suffix "-sin" spelled as-is, would be a variant Romanization of a Chinese syllable. Quite possibly xin 心 meaning heart or center, or 新 meaning new (as in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region).

Another possibility is local dialects: the Mandarin word 省 sheng becomes sing in Cantonese and other local dialects, and historically Western traders often encountered folks from non-official locales in China first, giving rise to Western adoption of accented or local dialect place names.

TL;DR - Shansin could be a viable near-Chinese name (either because the Western first contact was via a smaller dialect, or because of phonetic shift). Possible Chinese names include:

陕心 - heart of the mountain pass - shaanxin
山心 - heart of the mountains - shanxin
山省 - mountain province - shansheng

As a final note, "Mandarin" as a word came to the English language via Portuguese, which itself got the word from a Malay and Sanskrit source.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by rflorisi

I think I found it! In DF Adventures 2: Tomb of the Dragon King, there is this excerpt:

“ Long ago, after Malthas split the Lightbringers into a hun- dred factions with heresy and before the mandarins of Shansin built their five-sided towers, two dragons came out of the jungles of Padan and passed the mountains of the Echo Wall.”

I believe that can be taken as the Mysterious/Forbidden East, being that I can’t think of any culture that would 1. Merit the title of mandarins and 2. Perhaps the five-sided towers are that of monasteries and pagodas? Correct me, if I’m wrong, but I think Sanshin is the answer I was looking for. Thoughts?

That's one of the tiny threads loosely connecting a number of otherwise apparently unrelated works (of mine, anyway; some others are left out). See the Pyramid Dungeon Collection for more details and the "Wellsprings of Creation" article in particular.