One Hundred Names

Part of the canon of Classical Chinese literature is the Hundred Family Names 百家姓 Bǎi jiā xìng. The Han Chinese have a small number of family names, and one colloquial way to refer to the Chinese people is as the 老百姓 Lǎo bǎi xìng Venerable hundred surnames or just 百姓 Bǎi xìng Hundred names. The term refers to the ‘ordinary working people’ not the government or rulers. There are actually 504 names in this list of names which dates back to the Song dynasty.

Young aspiring scholars would learn these names by heart, it is one way to pick up a few hundred characters. Most of the characters have meanings other than just the name, so learning the names is more useful than would otherwise seem; for example Qián as well as being a family name also means money. The names are arranged in lines of usually eight names in rhyming couplets.

The names are not in order of frequency of the family names, although it is true that the more common ones are near the top. Some of the most common surnames in China are Wang 王, Chen 陈, Li 李, Zhang 张 and Liu 刘. Towards the end of the list are some of the rarer two character family names. Although there are now about 3,000 family names only about 250 are common.

Here is the full list of names, they are written in both the modern, simplified and traditional forms if they are different. If they are the same the first column character(s) works for both forms. You will find the second, traditional form in any documents pre-1960 and these are still in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong and by most overseas Chinese. The Chinese character(s) and Pinyin are followed by the meaning in English and after that different pronunciations of the character in other Chinese languages such as Cantonese, Hakka, Vietnamese, Malaysian. Because the spoken sound can vary it is important to track down the actual written character for the name so that family ancestry can be traced.