Astronaut which describes it as "a hybrid of the Chinese term "taikong" (space) and the Greek "naut" (sailor)"; the term became more common in 2003 when China sent its first astronaut Yang Liwei into space aboard the "Shenzhou 5" spacecraft. This is the term used by Xinhua News Agency in the English version of the Chinese "People's Daily" since the advent of the Chinese space program. The origin of the term is unclear; as early as May 1998, Chiew Lee Yih () from Malaysia, used it in newsgroups. With the rise of space tourism, NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency
Chinese as a foreign language further. In a Biblical vein similar to Kircher's, he tried to demonstrate that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language. In his "An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language" (1669), he suggested that Chinese was the language spoken before the confusion of tongues. Inspired by these ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a "characteristica universalis" modelled on Chinese. Thus wrote Bacon: Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters: The serious study of the language in the West began with missionaries coming to China during the