Family name (#71; Topic I)

Family name, a Chinese invention, was in use for more than 5000 years. Li (Conduct), an all-encompassing work on human behavior compiled by Duke Dan of Zhou (1180-1082 BCE) and codified by Confucius (551-497 BCE), forbade people with same family names to marry, on eugenics grounds. In the Analects, Chen's Minister of Justice asked Confucius whether Duke Zhao of Lu (reign 541-510 BCE) knew Conduct, strongly commanding a negative answer -- the Duke not only married a woman with the same family name as the Duke's (Ji), but concealed this same-family-name marriage by disguising her under a misleading family name. (The confrontation is at 7.20; the above comments are from my annotations at 7.20n and 1.12n.) Earlier this year (reported in the People's Daily - Overseas Edition, 1/11/06), the Academia Sinica, based on a two-year study involving 296 million people in 1,100 cities and towns, found that, in these towns, a total of 4,100 family names are in use. (Altogether, over the last 20 years, researchers have collected more than 23,000 family names throughout China.) Leading the pack, accounting for 7.4% of the total, is Li (my family name), followed closely by Wang (at 7.2%) and Chang (6.8%). Rounding up the top 10 are Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang, Chao, Zhou, and Wu; 18 family names have 1+% each; the top 129 family names, each with 0.1+%, account for 87% of China's population. In olden days, the top 100 family names were compiled and used as a book for learning new words.
Posted at 8:26 pm, Monday, February 6, 2006