The story
Pseudo-loan from Chinese. Onomatopoeic, originally representing characteristic syllables of Chinese, such as Mandarin's qing and chong, Cantonese's cing¹ and cong¹, Hokkien's chheng and chhong, etc., as heard by English-speakers, and reinforced by perceptions of other Asian languages, especially with existing surnames of Chinese origin, such as Ching/Cheng and Chong/Chung.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.