List Of Common Chinese Surnames
These are lists of the most common Chinese surnames in the Republic and People's Republic of China, as well as among the Chinese diaspora overseas, as provided by authoritative government or academic sources. Chinese names also form the basis for many common Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese surnames in both translation and transliteration into those languages.
The conception of China as consisting of "the old 100 families" (老百姓, Lǎobǎixìng) is an ancient and traditional one, the most famous tally being the Song-era Hundred Family Surnames. Even today, the number of surnames in China is a little over 4,000, while the year 2000 US census found the number of American surnames held by at least 100 people to be more than 150,000 and more than 6.2 million surnames altogether.
The Chinese expression "Some Zhang, some Li" (张三李四, Zhāng sān, Lǐ sì) is used to mean "anyone" or "everyone", but the most common surnames are currently Wang in mainland China and Chen or Chan in Taiwan. A commonly cited factoid from the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records estimated that Zhang was the most common surname in the world, but no comprehensive information from China was available at the time and more recent editions have not repeated the claim. However, Zhang Wei (张伟) is the most common full name in mainland China.
Read more about List Of Common Chinese Surnames: Greater China Region
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list and/or common:
“Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives—from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango—with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to- date scripts for actors on the tourists’ stage.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“They sang, but had not human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;
They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)