Chinese, Korean, and Japanese scribes regularly wrote "Wa" or "Yamato" "Japan" with the Chinese character until the 8th century, when the Japanese found fault with it due to its offensive connotation, replacing it with "harmony, peace, balance". Retroactively, this character was adopted in Japan to refer to the country itself, often combined with the character (literally meaning "Great"), so as to write the name as "Yamato" () (Great Wa, in a manner similar to "e.g." Great Qing Empire, Greater British Empire). However, the pronunciation "Yamato" cannot be formed from the sounds of its constituent characters; it refers to a place in Japan and is speculated to originally mean "Mountain Gate" (山戸). Such words which use certain kanji to name a certain Japanese word solely for the purpose of representing the word's meaning regardless of the given kanji's on'yomi or kun'yomi, a.k.a. jukujikun, is not uncommon in Japanese. Other original names in Chinese texts include "Yamatai country" (), where a Queen Himiko lived. When "hi no moto", the indigenous Japanese way of saying "sun's origin", was written in kanji, it was given the characters . In time, these characters began to be read using Sino-Japanese readings, first "Nippon" and later "Nihon," although the two names are interchangeable to this day.