deus

Joss is a corruption of the Portuguese deus (God), from Latin deus. Portuguese missionaries and traders in China and Southeast Asia used deus for God, the divine, the sacred. In the Pidgin English that developed in Chinese treaty ports during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deus was corrupted to joss. The word lost its specific Christian meaning and became a general term for Chinese religious objects, deities, and practices — as seen through European eyes.

A joss stick is an incense stick, burned in Chinese temples and homes. A joss house is a Chinese temple. A joss paper is the ceremonial paper money burned as an offering to ancestors. In each compound, joss means 'Chinese religious' — a category that flattens Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and folk religion into a single Western word. The Portuguese God became a generic label for everything the Europeans did not understand about Chinese spiritual life.

The word entered English in the late seventeenth century and was used primarily in colonial and travel writing about China and Southeast Asia. It carried a patronizing tone: joss was the 'funny foreign god-word,' the pidgin term for a complex set of traditions that Europeans rarely bothered to distinguish. The reductive quality was the point — joss allowed colonial writers to talk about Chinese religion without having to understand it.

Joss stick has survived as the most common English term for the thin incense sticks used in Chinese and Southeast Asian practice. The word has largely shed its patronizing colonial tone — most people who say 'joss stick' are simply naming an object. But the etymology is still there: a Portuguese God, filtered through pidgin, flattened into a commodity.