I knew how to tell people where I come from in Chinese for several years already, but never really bothered to figure out how to write it. In Chinese, that is.
Like many foreign words, it is transcribed to Mandarin using phonetically similar characters. Only now I discovered the meaning of the individual characters that make up the Chinese way to say "Holland". It sounds vaguely similar to the English or Dutch pronounciation. In pinyin it reads "hé lán", with "hé" pronounced as the Dutch "ge" as in "geluk" (happiness), and the "á" in "lán" stretched and rising in pitch. See Google translate for a sound bite.
The Chinese character 荷 (hé) means "lotus", while 兰 (lán) means "orchid".
A clear reference to Holland's most famous export: flowers! I found another reference to Dutch flowers in the lobby of the old foreign student dormitory: a huge faded photo of the Keukenhof!
It's interesting how the Chinese choose the most suitable characters for phonetically transcribing foreign words. There are many other characters which are pronounced the same as these two (I found 35 for "he" and 23 for "lan"!), but they probably make less sense in describing The Netherlands, as Holland is also known. However, for example 喝阑 means "to drink late", which could also be an apt name ;)
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