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, Chinese children have recited those four syllables as their first introduction to the written language.
The first name is Zhao (赵). It is not the most common — that distinction belongs to Wang, Li, or Zhang, depending on the decade. Zhao ranks seventh nationally, with approximately 27 million bearers worldwide. It is first because when the Hundred Family Surnames was compiled, Zhao was the imperial surname. The man on the throne was Zhao Kuangyin (赵匡胤), the general who had founded the Song Dynasty. In a civilization that placed the emperor at the apex of the cosmic order, the imperial surname naturally came first. To be a Zhao was to share a name with the Son of Heaven.
But for thousands of Zhao clan members in the coastal villages of Taishan (台山, Táishān), in Guangdong’s Wuyi (五邑) region, that imperial lineage would come to mean nothing in a San Francisco laundry or on the railroad tracks of the Sierra Nevada. The journey from the Dragon Throne to the Gold Mountain basement is the story of the Zhao surname in the diaspora — a story of how a name that once ruled China survived the scattering of its bearers across five continents.
The Charioteer and the Emperor
The Zhao surname traces its origins back 3,100 years, to a figure named Zaofu (造父). According to the Records of the Grand Historian (《史记》, Shǐjì), Zaofu was the master charioteer of King Mu of Zhou (周穆王, r. 976-922 BCE). For those seeking their own surname’s origins, our Surname Compass offers a practical guide to genealogical research in the Wuyi region. When the king made his legendary journey to the distant Kunlun Mountains — a expedition that would echo through Chinese literature for millennia — it was Zaofu who held the reins. During a rebellion back in the capital, Zaofu’s swift driving enabled the king to return in time to suppress the uprising. In reward, Zaofu was enfeoffed at a place called Zhao City (赵城, Zhào Chéng) in present-day Shanxi Province. His descendants took Zhao as their surname.
The clan rose through the centuries. By the Warring States period (475-221 BCE), the State of Zhao (赵国, Zhào Guó) was one of the seven major powers contesting for control of China. The Zhao were known for their military innovation — it was King Wuling of Zhao who famously ordered his soldiers to adopt the cavalry tactics and nomadic dress of their northern enemies (胡服骑射, húfú qíshè), a reform that transformed Chinese warfare.
The apex came in 960 CE, when Zhao Kuangyin, a military commander, seized power in a carefully orchestrated coup and founded the Song Dynasty. For the next 319 years, through 18 emperors, the Zhao family ruled China. The Song was a golden age — a time of landscape painting and celadon porcelain, of movable-type printing and paper currency, of the great poet Su Shi and the scientific genius Shen Kuo. To carry the Zhao surname was to share in the prestige of one of China’s greatest dynasties.
The Zhao surname is unique among the major Wuyi surnames in carrying this direct imperial lineage. Most Wuyi surnames — Chen, Li, Huang, Zhang — have origins in feudal states or ministerial appointments. Only Zhao traces directly to a ruling dynasty. Like the Zhou surname, which gave its name to China’s longest dynasty, Zhao carries the weight of an imperial past into the diaspora present. This is a source of clan pride that Zhao genealogies emphasize: the Hundred Family Surnames begins with Zhao for a reason.
The Southern Flight
The Song Dynasty fell to the Mongols in 1279. The final battle took place at Yamen (崖门, Yámén), a coastal cliff near present-day Xinhui — in the very heart of what is now the Wuyi region. The child emperor Zhao Bing (赵昺) died there, the last of the Song line, carried into the sea by a loyal minister who chose drowning over capture.
But the Zhao imperial clan had already been scattering south for decades, fleeing first the Jurchen Jin invasion that captured the Song capital of Kaifeng in 1127, and then the inexorable Mongol advance. Zhao clan genealogies trace a specific migration route: Kaifeng (开封) → Hangzhou (杭州, the Southern Song capital) → Fujian (福建) → Guangdong (广东) → Taishan (台山). The distance covered was over 1,500 kilometers, a flight that unfolded across generations.
The founding ancestor of the Taishan Zhao clan is identified as Zhao Bishi (赵必是), a Song descendant who settled in what is now Shuibu township (水步镇, Shuǐbù Zhèn) around 1279 — the exact year the dynasty fell. His settlement was not a planned migration but a flight from political catastrophe, part of the broader southern scattering of the Song imperial clan.
Over the next seven centuries, the Zhao clan established villages concentrated in three Taishan townships: Shuibu, Duanfen (端芬, Duānfēn), and Baisha (白沙, Báishā). Zhaocun (赵村) — literally “Zhao Village” — in Shuibu is the oldest and largest, with a continuous history of over 700 years. The village’s Zhao Ancestral Hall (赵氏大宗祠, Zhào Shì Dà Zōngcí) was first built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and has been rebuilt multiple times, most recently in the 1990s with funding from overseas Zhao clan members. Inside, ancestral tablets (神主牌, shénzhǔpái) trace the lineage from the Song emperors through the Taishan branches — a genealogical chain linking the imperial court of Kaifeng to a village in the Pearl River Delta.
The Gold Mountain Call
In the 1850s, news reached Taishan that gold had been discovered in a place called California. The news traveled through the maritime trade networks of the Pearl River Delta — returning merchants, letters from early emigrants, the dockside rumors of Hong Kong and Macau. For the Zhao villages of Taishan, where typhoons regularly destroyed crops and arable land was scarce, the pull was irresistible.
The Zhao clan emigration register (出洋名册, chūyáng míngcè) records the names of over 3,000 Zhao men who left Taishan for overseas destinations between 1850 and 1949. The earliest were the “Gold Mountain pioneers” (金山先驱, Jīnshān Xiānqū) — young men who departed from Taishan’s coastal ports (Guanghai, Haiyan), traveled via Hong Kong or Macau, and arrived in San Francisco to try their luck in the goldfields.
The cost of passage was staggering: approximately 50 Mexican dollars, equivalent to roughly two years of a farmer’s income. Migration was financed through the credit-ticket system (赊单制, shēdānzhì) — emigration brokers (客头, kètóu) advanced passage money against future wages. The debt would take years to repay, and the wages were rarely as high as promised. But the alternative — staying in a typhoon-battered village with no path to prosperity — was worse.
Few Zhao emigrants struck gold. Most drifted into the occupational niches that became synonymous with Chinese America: laundries (by the 1870s, Chinese-operated laundries dominated the industry in San Francisco), restaurants (following a “laundry-to-restaurant” trajectory as capital accumulated), and railroad construction (an estimated 10,000-15,000 Chinese men worked on the Central Pacific Railroad). Zhao emigrants also went to Vancouver (for the British Columbia gold rush of 1858 and Canadian Pacific Railway construction), Sydney and Melbourne (for the Australian gold rushes of the 1850s), and Singapore (for the British colonial economy’s demand for labor).
“Gold Mountain” (金山, Jīnshān) was the dream. Washing strangers’ clothes for sixteen hours a day was the reality. The imperial surname that had once ruled China now belonged to the men who pressed shirts in the basements of San Francisco.
The Paper Sons
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 slammed the door. For the first time in American history, a specific ethnic group was barred from immigration based on race. Chinese laborers — the category that covered virtually every Zhao emigrant — were prohibited from entering the United States.
Zhao clan members adapted through what became the defining survival strategy of the Exclusion era: the “paper son” system (契纸儿子, qìzhǐ érzi). A paper son was a Chinese immigrant who entered the US by claiming to be the son of a Chinese-American citizen. The system worked because of a catastrophe that became an opportunity: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which destroyed the city’s Hall of Records — including birth certificates. After the earthquake, Chinese-American men could claim they were citizens by birth (their records destroyed) and that they had sons in China (no records to disprove the claim).
Each “citizen” could bring in sons, creating immigration “slots” that became valuable commodities — bought, sold, and inherited within families. Zhao clan associations facilitated the entire system: false documentation (fabricated birth certificates and village records), coaching (memorizing village geography, family relationships, and household layouts), and community complicity (entire Zhao villages participated in maintaining the fiction of paper kinship ties).
The interrogation took place at the Angel Island Immigration Station (天使岛, Tiānshǐ Dǎo) in San Francisco Bay, which operated from 1910 to 1940. Officials asked questions designed to trip up impostors: “How many steps from your house to the village well?” “What is your grandmother’s birth surname?” “Which direction does your front door face?” Interrogations could last hours or days. Like the Chen surname diaspora, whose members faced the same gauntlet, Zhao families navigated Angel Island with clan-prepared scripts and memorized testimonies. Detainees were held in barracks — some of the poetry they carved into the walls, expressing loneliness and despair, is preserved at the Angel Island museum today. Those who failed were deported.
The psychological cost was lifelong. Some Zhao men lived their entire American lives under false names, unable to reveal their true identities even to their own children. The “confession program” of the 1950s-1960s allowed paper sons to confess and adjust their immigration status — but confessing risked implicating the family members who had sponsored them. Only when a Zhao elder died might his children discover, among his papers, a document revealing that their surname was not what they thought it was.
The Women Who Waited
With Chinese women effectively barred from entering the United States (the 1860 census showed a male-to-female ratio of nearly 19:1 among Chinese in California), Zhao wives remained in Taishan villages. These women were called Jinshanpo (金山婆) — literally “Gold Mountain wives” — a term that carried both respect and pathos. They had a husband in prosperous America, but they were effectively single women, managing households alone, often for decades.
Some married by proxy, the absent groom represented by a rooster at the wedding ceremony. The bride would then join her husband’s family household — her in-laws — and begin the long wait. Zhao clan genealogies record “virtuous women” (贞烈女, zhēnliènǚ) who remained faithful to absent husbands for decades, raising children, managing finances, and maintaining clan institutions in the absence of men. Some of these women were widowed by distance — their husbands died in America, but the news took months to arrive, if it arrived at all.
These women were the unacknowledged administrative backbone of the qiaoxiang economy. They received and allocated remittances, making household financial decisions. They supervised the construction of Western-style houses (侨乡洋楼, qiáoxiāng yánglóu) funded by overseas earnings. They educated children, often with a strong emphasis on the value of schooling funded by remittance money. They maintained ancestral rites, temple donations, and the social fabric of villages whose men were abroad.
The War Brides Act of 1945 finally enabled Zhao wives to join their husbands in the United States. After the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 — a wartime gesture of alliance with China against Japan, not a civil rights victory — thousands of Taishan women entered the US as wives of Chinese-American veterans. American Chinatowns, which had been overwhelmingly male “bachelor societies” for six decades, were transformed into family communities.
Letters Across the Ocean
A Zhao qiaopi letter from the 1920s, preserved in the Wuyi Qiaopi Archive at Wuyi University, reads: “$10 for mother’s medicine. $5 for the ancestral hall. $3 for brother’s school fees.” Then, in a different hand — shakier, perhaps the writer’s own, dropping the formal register: “I dream of our village every night.”
The qiaopi (侨批/银信) system — combining remittance and personal letter in a single delivery — was the financial and emotional backbone of Zhao transnational families for over a century. For a deeper look at how these letters worked, see our guide to reading qiaopi — the fragile paper documents that UNESCO recognized as world heritage. Qiaopi couriers (水客, shuǐkè, “water guests”) physically carried letters and cash across the Pacific. Qiaopi bureaus (侨批局, qiáopījú) managed the financial infrastructure. Zhao clan members operated their own qiaopi distribution channels through clan associations — Zhao-owned businesses in San Francisco, Vancouver, and Sydney served as remittance collection points, trusting in clan solidarity to ensure honest handling of funds.
The letters themselves contradict the stereotype of the emotionally distant Chinese patriarch. They are filled with longing, detailed concern for family welfare, and instructions that range from the financial to the moral: admonitions to children about filial piety, guidance on land purchases, reports on health conditions, descriptions of unfamiliar American life. One letter might contain a remittance instruction, a weather report from San Francisco, a question about a cousin’s exam results, and an expression of guilt for having been away so long.
The Wuyi Qiaopi Archive holds over 50,000 letters spanning the 1860s to the 1970s, including Zhao clan correspondence. In 2013, the archive was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, recognizing the qiaopi letters as documents of global historical significance. The archive has been increasingly digitized, allowing researchers — and Zhao descendants — to search by surname, village, and date, reconstructing family histories from the fragile paper traces left by their ancestors.
Destruction and Reconstruction
The 20th century nearly erased the Zhao clan’s heritage. The Japanese occupation of Taishan (1939-1945) devastated Zhao villages — populations were displaced, buildings destroyed, ancestral halls looted, and remittance flows from overseas were completely severed. The Zhao clan genealogy records “missing persons” (失考, shīkǎo): names of clan members lost during the war whose fates remain unknown.
After the Communist victory in 1949, the new government classified overseas Chinese connections as “complicated overseas relations” (复杂的海外关系, fùzá de hǎiwài guānxì). Zhao clan members with relatives abroad were viewed with suspicion — potential spies, capitalist sympathizers, or secret Nationalist agents. The material benefits of overseas connections (remittances, qiaoxiang houses) became political liabilities.
The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was catastrophic. Zhao ancestral halls were desecrated or destroyed. Clan genealogies were burned as “feudal remnants” (封建残余, fēngjiàn cányú). Overseas remittances were criminalized as evidence of foreign capitalist connections. Zhao clan members with overseas relatives faced persecution, blocked from education and career advancement. The “Cultural Revolution gap” in Zhao clan genealogies — pages torn out, entries left blank, entire branches erased — is a physical scar on the historical record.
Then, after Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening (改革开放, Gǎigé Kāifàng) in 1978, everything changed. Overseas Chinese were reclassified from security threats to “patriotic compatriots” (爱国侨胞, àiguó qiáobāo) — valued sources of investment capital and foreign expertise. Zhao clan genealogies were reconstructed from memory, surviving fragments, and copies that had been preserved overseas. Zhao ancestral halls were rebuilt — the Zhao Ancestral Hall in Shuibu, reconstructed in the 1990s with significant donations from overseas Zhao clan members, stands as a monument to this resilience.
The “reconnection log” (重联录, chóngliánlù) in Zhao clan genealogies records overseas Zhao descendants who reestablished contact with their ancestral villages in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s — the first time many branches had communicated with their Taishan roots since before World War II.
Coming Home
Since the 1990s, a particular kind of visitor has been appearing in Zhaocun and the other Zhao villages of Taishan: the third-generation descendant, clutching fragmentary family stories. “My grandfather said we came from a village near the Tan River.” “My great-grandmother’s name was Zhao A-Mei.” “I think the family left in 1912.” They arrive with the fragments — a name, a date, a half-remembered story — and seek to reconstruct the whole.
At the Zhao Ancestral Hall in Shuibu, clan elders perform what is called genealogy verification (族谱验证, zúpǔ yànzhèng). The visitor presents their branch genealogy — a photocopied page, a handwritten family tree, a qiaopi letter with a return address. The elders consult the comprehensive clan genealogy, tracing the lineage from the founding ancestor Zhao Bishi through the Taishan branches. When a match is found — when the name on a great-grandfather’s qiaopi letter corresponds to an entry in the clan register — it is a homecoming that transcends geography.
The economics of this roots tourism (寻根旅游, xúngēn lǚyóu) have transformed some Zhao villages. Guided tours, commemorative plaques, and small museums now cater to diaspora visitors. For those considering their own journey, our guide to tracing your surname to an ancestral village walks through the process. But the deeper transaction is emotional: the answer to a question carried across four generations and an ocean. “Where did we come from?” The Zhao Ancestral Hall, with its tablets and genealogies and seven centuries of continuous settlement, provides an answer that is tangible, specific, and grounded in a particular square of earth in Shuibu township.
The Meaning of a Name
The COVID-19 pandemic was the first complete travel barrier between the Zhao diaspora and Taishan in over 40 years. Zhao clan members who had made annual visits to ancestral villages for decades suddenly could not go. The response was characteristically adaptive: virtual Qingming observances, Zoom ancestral rites, WeChat video tours of village tomb-sweeping activities. The WeChat groups that connect Zhao clan members globally — sharing genealogical research, organizing reunions, maintaining clan identity — became, during the pandemic, the digital equivalent of the qiaopi network. A new form of the same old function: maintaining kinship across distance.
The Zhao surname’s journey spans 3,100 years — from Zhou charioteer to Song emperor, from southern refugee to Gold Mountain laundryman, from paper son to roots-tour seeker. Like the Liang surname, another Wuyi clan tracing its origins to the Zhou Dynasty, Zhao’s story is one of remarkable persistence across millennia. Clan associations and brotherhoods, explored in our piece on Wuyi diaspora clans, provided the social infrastructure that made this survival possible. It is a story of extraordinary falls (the Dragon Throne to the railroad track) and extraordinary persistence (the ancestral hall rebuilt, the genealogy reconstructed, the reconnection log filling with new entries). Empires fall. Genealogies are burned. Families are scattered. But a name, maintained through ancestral halls and qiaopi letters and WeChat groups and generation poems, holds the line.
The first name in the book is still being written.
Sources
- Sima Qian, 《史记》 (Records of the Grand Historian), c. 94 BCE — origin of the Zhao surname from Zaofu
- 《元和姓纂》 (Yuanhe Surname Compilation), 812 CE — early genealogical record of the Zhao surname
- Tuotuo et al., 《宋史》 (History of Song), 1345 CE — official history of the Song Dynasty
- 《百家姓》 (Hundred Family Surnames), early Song Dynasty — Zhao listed first as imperial surname
- 《台山赵氏族谱》 (Taishan Zhao Clan Genealogy), various editions — clan-specific genealogical data
- 梅伟强 et al., 《五邑华侨华人史》 (History of Wuyi Overseas Chinese), 广东人民出版社, 2001
- 黄昆章, 《广东台山华侨史》 (History of Taishan Overseas Chinese), 广东人民出版社, 2010
- 刘进, 《银信与五邑侨乡社会》 (Silver Letters and Wuyi Qiaoxiang Society), 广东人民出版社, 2011
- 袁丁, 《跨国移民与近代广东侨乡》 (Transnational Migration and Modern Guangdong Qiaoxiang), 暨南大学出版社, 2019
- Hsu, Madeline Y., Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943, Stanford University Press, 2000
- Ngai, Mae M., Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Princeton University Press, 2004 — on the paper son system and Angel Island
- Wuyi Qiaopi Archive, Wuyi University, Jiangmen — UNESCO Memory of the World Register (2013). https://en.unesco.org/memoryoftheworld
- Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation — https://www.angelisland.org
- Baidu Baike — “赵姓” (Zhao Surname) — https://baike.baidu.com/item/赵姓
- Baidu Baike — “百家姓” (Hundred Family Surnames) — https://baike.baidu.com/item/百家姓
- 广东省立中山图书馆, 《岭南姓氏族谱辑录》 (Compilation of Lingnan Surname Genealogies), 广东人民出版社, 2002
Continue Reading
- Your Surname, Your Compass: Navigating Wuyi Roots
- The Zhou Surname: Three Thousand Years from China’s Longest Dynasty to the Wuyi Diaspora
- The Chen Surname Wuyi Diaspora: From Yingchuan to the Seven Sons
- The Liang Surname: 2,700 Years from Zhou Dynasty State to Wuyi Diaspora
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