Mao Surname (毛): The Hundred Thousand Who Were Never There
A Surname Everyone Can Name, and a Village Nobody Can Find There are roughly 3.2 million people named Mao in China — about 0.27 per cent of the Han population, and a top-100 surname in most published rankings. Most people outside China who recognise the Mao surname learned it from one of them. 崖西 (Yáxī)
The Xiong (熊) Surname: A Royal Line’s 1,430-Year Road to Guangdong
A top-100 surname that spent eight hundred years not being a surname There are surnames that remember a place, a trade, an office, a tree. The Xiong surname (熊, Xióng) remembers a change of category. It is a top-100 Chinese surname, usually ranked 68th; tables run 68th to 72nd, between 3.6 and 4.4 million bearers
The Mai (麦) Surname: One Sui General’s Bowl of Wheat and the Siyi Lineages It Seeded
A Surname That Begins With a Man and a Bowl of Wheat The Chinese surname Mai — 麦 (Mài), traditional form 麥, the character for wheat — is small and hyper-local. Tallies put it between roughly 140th and 210th among Chinese surnames, and about seventy percent of its carriers live in one province, Guangdong —
The Jiang (姜) Surname: From the Yan Emperor and Jiang Taigong to the Wuyi Diaspora
A River Named a People Most northern Chinese surnames trace to one of two ancestral stems: Ji (姬, Jī), the Zhou royal surname, and Jiang — written 姜 (Jiāng) — the older kind of name, a place before it was a family. The classical Guoyu preserves the charter: 「黄帝以姬水成，炎帝以姜水成」 — the Yellow Emperor came to
The Jiang (江) Surname: From the Fall of a Small State to the Overseas Diaspora
One of China’s top-100 surnames — 江 (Jiāng), usually counted around seventy-ninth by population — did not begin as a kingdom’s triumph. It began as a kingdom’s end. The name is what was left after a small state on the Huai River was swallowed by its larger neighbour in 623 BCE, and the people who
The Xu (徐) Surname: From the State of Xu to the Wuyi Tanka and Overseas Diaspora
The Xu (徐) Surname: From the State of Xu to the Wuyi Tanka and Overseas Diaspora Two Surnames, One Pronunciation Ask where the Xu surname origin lies and the answer runs to a state rather than a dynasty. The Xu surname (徐, Xú) descends, in its own lineage tradition, from the lower Huai river —
The Xiao (萧/肖) Surname: One Name, Two Characters, Many Spellings
The Xiao (萧/肖) Surname: One Name, Two Characters, Many Spellings The Chinese surname Xiao is registered under two characters — Xiao (萧, Xiāo), the older form, and Xiao (肖, Xiào, also read Xiāo as a surname), the substitute the mainland registers carry — and the difference is neither ancient nor genealogical: it is the residue
The Lu (陆) Surname: From Yamen’s Loyal Minister to the Wuyi Diaspora
The Lu (陆) Surname: From Yamen’s Loyal Minister to the Wuyi Diaspora Lu (陆, Lù) is a top-hundred Chinese surname: 57th to 60th on the 2018 household-registry counts, about 4.2 to 4.4 million mainland bearers — Yuan Yida’s Contemporary Hundred Surnames (2005) gives 60th at 0.31 per cent, other compilations 61st at 4.8 million, an
The Tang (汤) Surname: From the Shang Dynasty’s Founding King to a 900-Year Wuyi Lineage
The Tang (汤) Surname: From the Shang Dynasty’s Founding King to a 900-Year Wuyi Lineage A Surname from the Founding of a Dynasty (Tang, Tāng) The Tang (汤, Tāng) surname takes its character from Cheng Tang (成汤, Chéng Tāng), the king who founded the Shang dynasty (商朝, Shāng cháo) around 1600 BCE. Surname tradition derives
The Peng (彭) Surname: A Top-31 Name, Scattered Thin at the Edge of the Wuyi Diaspora
The Peng (彭) Surname: A Top-31 Name, Scattered Thin at the Edge of the Wuyi Diaspora The Peng surname (彭, Péng) ranks about thirty-first among China’s surnames, with roughly 6.9 million bearers — about 0.49 percent of the Han population — according to the cited surname study, Wu Jianhua’s Peng Surname History (Peng Xing Shihua),
The Gong (龚) Surname: From Ancient Water Gods to the Taishan Diaspora
The Gong (龚) Surname: From Ancient Water Gods to the Taishan Diaspora Few surnames in China’s top hundred carry a longer remembered past — or a stranger one — than the Gong surname (龚, gōng): roughly 2.5 to 3 million bearers, ranked near 89th in the 2018 household-registry count; a name spelled Gong in pinyin,
The Fang (方) Surname: From the Fall of the Song Court to the Towers of Kaiping
The Fang (方) Surname: From the Fall of the Song Court to the Towers of Kaiping Fang (方, fāng; Fong in Cantonese-speaking communities) is one of the most portable surnames in the Chinese world — a single character that turns up in the phone books of Vancouver, San Francisco, Havana, and Singapore. In China alone