The Name That Means "King"
The Wang surname — 王 (Wáng), simply the Chinese character for "king" — is the second most common surname in the world. One hundred and one million people in China carry it, and an estimated six to eight million more overseas trace their ancestry through it. It is not an…
Clan Genealogy
In 230 BCE, the armies of Qin entered the capital of the state of Han (韩国). Han, smallest and most vulnerable of the seven Warring States, was the first to fall in the Qin unification campaign. Most royal houses that resisted Qin were exterminated. But members of the Han royal family escaped. Fleeing south from…
The Sun surname (孙) traces its roots to three ancient Chinese noble lineages — the Ji (姬) clan of the Zhou dynasty, the Mi (芈) clan of Chu, and the Gui (妫) clan of Qi — converging over three millennia into a single name now carried by 18 million people worldwide. Among Chinese surnames, Sun…
Every Chinese person who has ever learned to read has memorized the same four characters: 赵钱孙李 — Zhao, Qian, Sun, Li. These are the opening words of the Hundred Family Surnames (百家姓, Bǎijiāxìng), the most famous roster of Chinese names in history, compiled during the Song Dynasty (宋朝, Sòng Cháo, 960-1279 CE). For a millennium,…
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One hundred million people alive today carry the surname 李 (Lǐ). If they were a nation, they would be the fourteenth largest on Earth — more populous than Egypt, Vietnam, or Germany. The character appears on mailboxes from San Francisco to Singapore, on tombstones in the goldfields of Ballarat, on business cards in Vancouver,…