Chinese Surname - Common Chinese Surnames - Taiwan

Taiwan

Names in Taiwan – both among the immigrant ethnic Chinese and Taiwanese aborigines – are similar to those in southeast China but differ somewhat from the distribution of names among all Han Chinese. According to a comprehensive survey of residential permits released by the Taiwanese Ministry of the Interior's Department of Population in February, 2005, the ten most common surnames on Taiwan are Chen (陳), Lin (林), Huang (黃), Zhang (張), Li (李), Wang (王), Wu (吳), Liu (劉), Cai (蔡), and Yang (楊).

Taiwanese surnames include some archaic ones which have since become rare in China such as Ruan (阮), which became the common Vietnamese surname "Nguyen" – and some local variants like Wen (溫) and Tu (塗) which do not even appear among the Hundred Family Surnames. However, names on Taiwan show less diversity than China as a whole: the top ten comprise 52.63% of the Taiwanese population and the top hundred 96.11%. There were also only 1,989 surnames recorded by the Ministry's survey, against China's four or five thousand.

As is typical of China as a whole, these surnames conflate many different lineages and origins, although tradition may bind them to the same ancestral temples and rituals or ban intermarriage. For example, some aboriginal Taiwanese adopted the surname Pan (潘) from modification of their status as "barbarians" (番, fan). Some Taiwanese converts to Presbyterianism adopted the name Kai (偕, Xié) in honor of the Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay (馬偕, Má-kai).