Chinese surname

Chinese surnames are used by Han Chinese and Sinicized ethnic groups in Greater China, Korea, Vietnam and among overseas Chinese communities around the world such as Singapore and Malaysia. Written Chinese names begin with surnames, unlike the Western tradition in which surnames are written last. Around 2,000 Han Chinese surnames are currently in use, but the great proportion of Han Chinese people use only a relatively small number of these surnames; 19 surnames are used by around half of the Han Chinese people, while 100 surnames are used by around 87% of the population. A report in 2019 gives the most common Chinese surnames as Wang and Li, each shared by over 100 million people in China. The remaining eight of the top ten most common Chinese surnames are Zhang, Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang, Zhao, Wu and Zhou.

Two distinct types of Chinese surnames existed in ancient China, namely xing (Chinese: 姓; pinyin: xìng) ancestral clan names and shi (Chinese: 氏; pinyin: shì) branch lineage names. Later, the two terms were used interchangeably, and in the present day, xing refers to the surname and shi may refer either the clan or maiden name. The two terms may also be used together as xingshi for family names or surnames. Most Chinese surnames (xing) in current use were originally shi. The earliest xing surname might be matrilinear, but Han Chinese family name has been exclusively patrilineal for a couple of millennia, passing from father to children. This system of patrilineal surnames is unusual in the world in its long period of continuity and depth of written history, and Chinese people may view their surnames as part of their shared kinship and Han Chinese identity. Women do not normally change their surnames upon marriage, except sometimes in places with more western influences such as Hong Kong. Traditionally Chinese surnames have been exogamous in that people tend to marry those with different surnames.

The most common Chinese surnames were compiled in the Song dynasty work Hundred Family Surnames, which lists over 400 names. The colloquial expressions lǎobǎixìng (老百姓; lit. "old hundred surnames") and bǎixìng (wikt:百姓, lit. "hundred surnames") are used in Chinese to mean "ordinary folks", "the people", or "commoners".

Chinese surnames have a history of over 3,000 years. Chinese mythology, however, reaches back further to the legendary figure Fuxi (with the surname Feng), who was said to have established the system of Chinese surnames to distinguish different families and prevent marriage of people with the same family names. Prior to the Warring States period (fifth century BC), only the ruling families and the aristocratic elite had surnames. Historically there was a difference between ancestral clan names or xing (姓) and branch lineage names or shi (氏). Xing may be the more ancient surname that referred to the ancestral tribe or clan, while shi denoted a branch of the tribe or clan. For example, the ancestors of the Shang had Zi (子) as xing, but the descendants were subdivided into numerous shi including Yin (殷), Song (宋), Kong (空), Tong (同) and others. The distinction between the two began to be blurred by the Warring States period. During the Qin dynasty, name usage was standardised, commoners started to acquire a surname or xing, and the shi also became xing. By the Han dynasty, families only had xing or xing-shi. The great majority of Han Chinese surnames (now called xing or xingshi) that survive to modern times have their roots in shi rather than the ancient xing.

In modern usage, xing is the surname, but the word shi survives as a word to refer to the clan. The term shi may be appended to the surname of a person; for example, a man with the Zhang surname may be referred to as Zhang-shi instead of his full name. It is used in particular for the paternal surname of a married woman, therefore in this case shi means maiden name, which a Chinese woman would continue to use after marriage.

The ancient xing were surnames held by the noble clans. They generally contain a "female" (Chinese: 女; pinyin: nǚ) radical, for example Ji (姬), Jiang (姜), Yao (姚) and Yíng (嬴). This is taken as evidence that they originated from matriarchal societies based on maternal lineages. The character for xing itself is composed of a female radical and the character for "give birth" (生, shēng). Xing is believed to have been originally transmitted through women of noble birth, while noble men have shi.

Scholars such as Edwin G. Pulleyblank, however, are unconvinced by the matriarchy theory of Chinese surnames due to a lack of independent evidence. An alternative hypothesis has been proposed, suggesting that the use of female radical in xing may have arisen from the clan exogamy system used during the Zhou dynasty (the words xing and shi also did not exist in the Shang dynasty oracle bones). In ancient times, people of the same xing were not permitted to marry each other and a woman married into an aristocratic clan needed to be of a different name. Based on observation of the evolution of characters in oracular scripture from the Shang dynasty through the Zhou: the 女 radical seems to appear during the Zhou period next to Shang sinograms indicating a clan or a tribe. This combination seems to designate specifically a female and could mean "lady of such or such clan". The structure of the xing sinogram could reflect the fact that in the royal court of Zhou, at least in the beginning, only females (wives married into the Zhou family from other clans) were called by their birth clan name, while the men were usually designated by their title or fief.

While people of the same xing were not permitted to marry each other, those with the same shi can. By the Han dynasty when everyone had xing and the surname was transmitted paternally, the practice continued, but it had changed to marriage between families of men on the paternal side being prohibited, but not on the maternal side.