山寨shān zhài

The old meaning is a fort in the hills where outlaws hide, as in the classic novel Water Margin.

The new meaning covers anything copied: a 山寨手机 is a knock-off phone, and a 山寨 bag copies a famous brand. It also came to mean “unofficial” or “homemade”, as in an amateur version of a famous TV show.

山寨 is now ordinary Chinese. You use it for a fake product, and as a joke for anything that looks like a cheap copy of the real thing, from a cake to a costume.

The knock-off sense comes from Cantonese, where 山寨 described small, unbranded workshops. In the mid-2000s, small factories in the Pearl River Delta made cheap phones that copied the look of famous brands, and people called them 山寨手机.

In 2008 the word spread from phones to almost everything. 咬文嚼字, a magazine about language use, put 山寨 first on its list of the ten most popular phrases of 2008. It noted that the word had widened from fake products to mean “of the people” or “unofficial”.