The He (贺) Surname: From Wu State Nobility to the Wuyi Diaspora

Not every Chinese surname begins with a murder. This one does.

If your surname is He — written 贺, not 何 — you carry a name born from one of the most dramatic assassinations in Chinese history. In 514 BCE, in the state of Wu (吴) near modern-day Suzhou, a cook named Zhuan Zhu (专诸) presented a steamed fish to King Liao (吴王僚). Hidden inside the fish was a dagger. The king died at the banquet table, and the state of Wu plunged into chaos. The king’s son, a young man named Qingji (庆忌), escaped into hiding. His descendants, fearing political persecution, changed their surname from 庆 (Qing — “celebration”) to 贺 (He — “congratulation”), a subtle shift in meaning that obscured their royal lineage. The He surname was born.

This is the story of that name — its violent birth, its journey across 2,500 years from the Spring and Autumn period through Tang dynasty poetry, revolutionary battlefields, and the crowded decks of ships leaving Haikou Port (海口埠) for Gold Mountain.

A note before we begin: This article is about He (贺), a surname whose origin traces to the state of Wu. It is entirely separate from He (何), a surname that originated from the ancient state of Han (韩) and was the subject of a previous article in the Surname Archive. Same pinyin, two completely different surnames, two completely different histories. If you’re unsure which He surname is yours, check your Chinese character — 贺 or 何. The Surname Compass can help you trace both.

The Dagger in the Fish

The assassination of King Liao appears in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (史记), written around 94 BCE, and it reads like a screenplay. Prince Guang (公子光) — the king’s cousin — wanted the throne. He recruited Zhuan Zhu, a cook with a reputation for loyalty, and trained him for three years. The plan was exquisitely simple: Zhuan Zhu would serve the king a fish, and the fish would contain a blade.

At the banquet, guards searched every servant for weapons. Zhuan Zhu, carrying the steaming fish on a platter, passed inspection. He knelt before the king, broke open the fish, seized the hidden dagger — and struck. The king’s guards killed Zhuan Zhu on the spot, but the assassination was complete. Prince Guang became King Helü of Wu (吴王阖闾), a ruler who would later employ the military strategist Sun Tzu (孙子) and build the army that nearly conquered the state of Chu.

But the story of the He surname begins with the dead king’s son. Qingji, a young man known for his physical prowess, escaped the purge that followed the coup. He fled Wu, and his descendants — stripped of power, marked by their lineage — changed their surname from 庆 to 贺. The two characters share the same pronunciation in modern Mandarin, but their meanings differ subtly: 庆 suggests celebration, festivity; 贺 suggests congratulation, felicitation. The shift was a linguistic disguise — close enough to remember, different enough to hide.

In 473 BCE, the state of Wu fell to its rival Yue (越). By then, the He lineage was already scattered, carrying its new name into the anonymity that would preserve it for the next two and a half millennia.

The Poet Who Came Home a Stranger

Fast forward 1,200 years. The Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) is China’s golden age — the largest, wealthiest, most cosmopolitan empire on earth. At the imperial court in Chang’an (modern Xi’an), a He-surname poet has become famous.

He Zizhen (贺知章, 659-744 CE) was a calligrapher, a statesman, and one of the “Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup” (饮中八仙) — a group of Tang poets immortalized by Du Fu (杜甫) for their drinking prowess and literary brilliance. He Zizhen’s drinking companion was none other than Li Bai (李白), the greatest poet in Chinese history. According to Tang anecdotes, He Zizhen was the first to call Li Bai a “banished immortal” (谪仙人) — a phrase that became Li Bai’s most famous epithet.

But He Zizhen’s most enduring contribution to Chinese culture is a single poem, written when he was in his eighties and returning home after a lifetime at court. He had become a Daoist priest. He was going back to Kuaiji (会稽), in modern Zhejiang, where he was born. The poem is called “Returning Home” (回乡偶书):

少小离家老大回，乡音无改鬓毛衰。
儿童相见不相识，笑问客从何处来。

I left home young, return home old — my accent unchanged, my hair grown thin.
Children see me, don’t recognize me, laugh and ask: stranger, where do you come from?

Every Chinese schoolchild has memorized this poem. It has been taught continuously for over thirteen centuries. And for diaspora readers — people whose families left China generations ago and who return to ancestral villages where no one knows their name — the poem is almost unbearably literal. You stand in the street where your great-grandfather was born. Someone’s child looks at you and asks who you are. You have the surname, but you’ve become a stranger in the place that gave it to you.

This is the same experience described in other Wuyi diaspora stories — the ache of returning home only to find yourself a foreigner in the land of your ancestors.

He Zizhen died in Kuaiji shortly after writing the poem. He had come home. His name — He (贺), the name born from an assassination — was now carried by a poet whose words would outlast the Tang dynasty, outlast the empire itself, and follow the He diaspora across the Pacific.

The Long Road South

Between the assassination of King Liao and the poetry of He Zizhen lies a millennium of southward migration — the slow, intermittent movement of He-surname families from the lower Yangtze into the Pearl River Delta.

During the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), the He surname concentrated in Kuaiji commandery (会稽郡) — a region corresponding to modern Shaoxing in Zhejiang province. This is why, to this day, He clan halls everywhere in China carry the name “Kuaiji Hall” (会稽堂). The hall name is a geographical memory — a way of saying: we came from there.

The Jin dynasty (265-420 CE) brought chaos. Northern China fell to non-Han rulers, and waves of Han families fled south across the Yangtze. He-surname clans moved through Fujian province, settling temporarily before continuing southward. By the Tang-Song transition (10th-13th centuries), He families had entered Guangdong — following migration paths similar to those documented in the Wuyi diaspora overview.

Many Cantonese clans — including some He lineages — trace their arrival through Zhujixiang (珠玑巷), a village in northern Guangdong that serves as the legendary transit point for 33 families who migrated south together in 1273 CE during the final years of the Southern Song dynasty. Whether every He clan actually passed through Zhujixiang is debatable — genealogical traditions are often more symbolic than documentary. But the Zhujixiang story matters because it connects the He surname to the broader Cantonese origin narrative. Your ancestors may or may not have slept in that particular village. But they were part of the same human river — families moving south, generation by generation, carrying names and memories and the Kuaiji Hall name.

He Villages in Wuyi

By the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties, He-surname clans had established villages throughout the Siyi (四邑) or Wuyi (五邑) region — the five-county area of Guangdong comprising Taishan (台山), Kaiping (开平), Enping (恩平), Xinhui (新会), and Heshan (鹤山). This region would become the epicenter of Chinese emigration to the Americas.

He-surname villages are found in several Taishan townships: Duanfen (端芬镇), a major emigration zone whose overseas connections span from Chicago to Singapore; Baisha (白沙镇), in Taishan’s interior; and Haiyan (海宴镇), the coastal township that is home to the Overseas Chinese Farm (华侨农场) built for returned migrants in the 1960s. In Kaiping, He clans settled in Chikan (赤坎), Shuikou (水口), and Chacheng (蚬冈) — names that would later become familiar to diaspora descendants tracing their roots. Some He lineages also established villages in Xinhui.

The exact founding dates of these villages — which He ancestor first cleared the land, which generation built the first ancestral hall — require genealogical fieldwork that has not been digitized. Clan genealogy books (族谱) in these villages, if they survive, record this information in handwritten characters on rice paper. But the broad pattern is clear: He-surname clans were part of the Wuyi settlement fabric, integrated into the same township networks, the same market-town economies, the same lineage-hall culture as every other surname in the region — from Guo to Luo to Xie.

The He clan’s generation poem (辈分诗) — a poem whose characters are assigned sequentially to each generation as the middle character of personal names — encodes the clan’s values and aspirations. A typical generation poem might read: “德业传家远, 诗书继世长” — “Virtue and enterprise carry the family far; poetry and books continue the lineage long.” If you are a He-surname diaspora descendant and know your generation character, you can place yourself precisely in the 2,500-year chain. The Village Atlas of Wuyi can help you locate your ancestral village and begin tracing your lineage.

Through Haikou Port

Between 1840 and 1940, over two million people left the Wuyi region. They departed from Haikou Port (海口埠) in Taishan, a waterfront crowded with junks and steamships, luggage and tears, qiaopi couriers and labor contractors. Every Wuyi surname — Lee, Chen, Wong, Liang, and He among them — passed through this port.

The mechanics of emigration are well documented. The credit-ticket system (赊单制) allowed poor laborers to finance their Pacific crossing by pledging future wages. The California Gold Rush of 1848-1855 created an insatiable demand for labor. Chain migration — one returned migrant paving the way for an entire village — turned individual departures into organized exodus. By the 1860s, Chinese laborers were building the western half of America’s Transcontinental Railroad, laying track through Sierra Nevada snow at wages far below their white counterparts.

He-surname migrants followed these same routes from the same ports. What distinguished them from larger Wuyi surnames was scale. Lee (李) is one of the most common surnames on earth; He (贺) has approximately 2.5 million bearers in China and a diaspora population estimated in the tens to low hundreds of thousands. This smaller scale meant fewer He-specific clan associations abroad, but potentially stronger intra-clan bonds — a smaller community remembers itself more intimately.

Paper Sons and Qiaopi Letters

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 changed everything. Chinese laborers were banned from entering the United States. Migration, which had been legal if arduous, became criminalized — and Wuyi villages responded with the most elaborate documentation fraud in American immigration history.

The “paper son” (纸生仔) system worked like this: a Chinese-American citizen would report the birth of a son to US authorities, creating a slot. That slot would be sold — sometimes to a relative, sometimes to a stranger — for hundreds of dollars. The purchaser memorized an elaborate fabricated family history from a coaching book (口供纸), answering questions about the layout of his “father’s” village house, the names of his “grandparents,” the location of the family pigpen. At Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, immigration officers interrogated paper sons for hours, sometimes days, trying to catch inconsistencies.

He-surname migrants participated in this system. Every Wuyi surname did. The paper son system was the community’s collective response to exclusion — not criminality but survival, not fraud but a refusal to accept that a law could sever the connection between village and diaspora.

While husbands, fathers, and sons navigated Angel Island, qiaopi letters (侨批, also called 银信 — “silver letters”) moved in the opposite direction. Qiaopi were unique documents: a single envelope containing both a remittance and a letter. The money went to the family; the letter told them what the money meant. Qiaopi scholarship documents a consistent spending pattern: approximately 60% of remittances went to housing (building qiaoxiang mansions and diaolou), 20% to daily expenses, 10% to education, and 10% to other needs including ancestral hall maintenance and grave upkeep. For deeper insight into what these letters reveal about family life, see our guide to reading qiaopi.

He-surname families received these letters. A He-surname husband in San Francisco’s Chinatown, working fourteen-hour days in a laundry or restaurant, would write to his wife in Duanfen: I am sending $50 this month. Use $30 for the house foundation. Make sure our son studies hard. Tell Mother I am eating well. I will come home when I have saved enough. These letters were the emotional and economic infrastructure of qiaoxiang — the threads that held families together across an ocean.

The Marshal

The He surname’s 20th-century chapter belongs to He Long (贺龙, 1896-1969), a figure whose life traces the violent arc of modern Chinese history.

He Long was born to a poor family in Sangzhi County, Hunan province. As a young man, he led a bandit gang — or a peasant self-defense force, depending on whom you ask. By the 1920s, he had joined the Chinese Communist Party and commanded troops in the Nanchang Uprising (南昌起义) of August 1, 1927, the event that marks the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. August 1 is still celebrated as Army Day in China, and He Long was there at the beginning.

He fought through the Long March (1934-1935), commanded the 120th Division during the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945), and rose to become one of the Ten Marshals of the PLA — the highest military rank in Communist China. He was Vice Premier of the State Council and oversaw China’s sports development program in the 1950s and 1960s.

Then came the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He Long was denounced as a “warlord” and “counter-revolutionary.” He was imprisoned, denied medical care, and — according to posthumous investigations — given food laced with glucose that exacerbated his diabetes. He died in custody on June 9, 1969, at age 73. The official cause was listed as “malnutrition and illness.”

In 1982, the Communist Party formally rehabilitated He Long, declaring that the charges against him were fabricated. A memorial museum now stands in Sangzhi County. His story — from bandit to marshal to victim to posthumous hero — is the story of 20th-century China itself: revolution, triumph, persecution, and the long, slow work of historical reckoning.

More Than Han

One of the most distinctive features of the He (贺) surname is its multi-ethnic heritage. The Wu state origin story — Qingji, the assassination, the name change — is a Han Chinese narrative. But it is not the only origin.

During the Northern Wei dynasty (386-534 CE), a period when non-Han Xianbei (鲜卑) rulers controlled northern China, many Xianbei clans adopted Chinese surnames as part of a sweeping sinicization policy. The He-lan clan (贺兰氏) — “He-lan” meaning “congratulate the orchid” or simply a Xianbei tribal name — shortened their name to He (贺). Centuries later, during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), the Manchu He-she-li clan (贺舍里氏) similarly adopted He.

This means that a He-surname bearer today could descend from Wu state royalty, from Xianbei steppe warriors, from Manchu banner families, or from a combination that intertwined across 1,500 years of intermarriage and cultural blending. The He surname is not a single bloodline — no Chinese surname is — but a vessel that has held multiple ethnic histories, much like the broader Wuyi migration story itself is a tapestry of different peoples and paths.

Finding He Today

In 2026, a third-generation Chinese-American with the surname He takes a 23andMe test. The results say: “Guangdong Province — likely Taishan or Kaiping region.” A Google search leads to the Surname Compass. A WeChat group called “贺氏宗亲会” (He Clan Association) accepts the new member. An elderly relative in Duanfen, located through the group, sends a photograph of the Kuaiji Hall ancestral temple. The diaspora descendant — who grew up in suburban California, who speaks English at home, who has never been to China — begins planning a roots trip. The Wuyi Roots Trip Accommodation Guide and Visa Planning Guide offer practical help for that journey.

This is the contemporary He surname story. The technology is new; the impulse is ancient. Every generation of He-surname bearers has asked some version of the same question: where do we come from? He Zizhen answered it with a poem. The paper sons answered it with fabricated genealogies memorized in coaching sessions. The qiaopi writers answered it with remittance letters. The He-surname diaspora answers it today with DNA kits and WeChat messages and flights to Guangzhou Baiyun Airport.

The He surname has approximately 2.5 million bearers in China. The diaspora population — spread across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe — is harder to count but probably numbers in the tens to low hundreds of thousands. He clan associations exist in Southeast Asian cities and North American Chinatowns, smaller and less visible than associations for massive surnames like Lee or Chen, but active and enduring.

Return

He Zizhen wrote his poem in the 740s. The children who didn’t recognize him are 1,300 years dead. The village he returned to has been rebuilt a dozen times. But the question the children asked — “stranger, where do you come from?” — is still being asked, in ancestral halls and WeChat groups and DNA test results, by every diaspora descendant who carries the He (贺) surname and wants to know what it means.

The answer is: you come from an assassination. You come from a name change designed to hide. You come from a poet who understood, twelve centuries before you were born, that coming home means becoming a stranger. You come from Haikou Port, from qiaopi letters, from paper sons who memorized false genealogies to survive. You come from a revolutionary marshal and from Xianbei warriors who took this Chinese name and made it their own. You come from a name that has survived 2,500 years of dynasties rising and falling, of borders redrawn, of families separated and reunited across oceans — a story echoed in two hundred years of Wuyi diaspora history.

“乡音无改鬓毛衰” — accent unchanged, hair thinned. Your accent may have changed across three generations in California. But the name remains. He (贺). This one. From Wu state nobility to the global diaspora. Still here.

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Sources

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2. 台山市华侨志编纂委员会. 广东台山华侨史 [History of Overseas Chinese from Taishan, Guangdong]. 广东人民出版社, 2010.
3. 刘进. 银信与五邑侨乡社会 [Qiaopi and Wuyi Qiaoxiang Society]. 暨南大学出版社, 2011.
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7. 贺氏宗亲联谊会. 中华姓氏通史·贺姓 [Comprehensive History of Chinese Surnames: The He Surname]. 东方出版社, 2010.
8. UNESCO World Heritage List. “Kaiping Diaolou and Villages.” https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1112
9. UNESCO Memory of the World. “Qiaopi and Yinxin Correspondence and Remittance Documents from Overseas Chinese.” 2013.
10. Baidu Baike. “贺姓” [He Surname]. https://baike.baidu.com/item/贺姓
11. Baidu Baike. “贺知章” [He Zizhen]. https://baike.baidu.com/item/贺知章
12. Baidu Baike. “贺龙” [He Long]. https://baike.baidu.com/item/贺龙
13. U.S. National Archives. “Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).” https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusion-act
14. Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. https://www.aiisf.org/

Continue Reading

• Your Surname, Your Compass: A Wuyi Roots Journey
• The Guo (郭) Surname: From Zhou Dynasty Nobility to the Wuyi Diaspora
• From Haikou Port to the World: 200 Years of Wuyi Diaspora
• What Is Qiaopi? A Beginner’s Guide to Chinese Remittance Letters
• The Guan Clan’s 700-Year Odyssey: From Northern Fortresses to Southern Shores

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