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…
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 —…
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…
If your family traces its roots to Taishan, Kaiping, Enping, Xinhui, or Heshan—collectively known as Wuyi (五邑) —then you are part of one of the most far-reaching Chinese diasporas in history. Across generations and continents, descendants of this small region have built lives in nearly every corner of the world. Yet for many today, especially…