Hundred Family Surnames

The Hundred Family Surnames (Chinese: 百家姓), commonly known as Bai Jia Xing,^[1] also translated as Hundreds of Chinese Surnames,^[2] is a classic Chinese text composed of common Chinese surnames. The book was composed in the early Song dynasty.^[3] It originally contained 411 surnames, and was later expanded to 504.^[when?][3] Of these, 444 are single-character surnames and 60 are double-character surnames. About 800 names have been derived from the original ones.^[4]

In the dynasties following the Song, the Three Character Classic, the Hundred Family Surnames, and Thousand Character Classic came to be known as San Bai Qian (Three, Hundred, Thousand), from the first character in their titles, and were the enlightenment books for children.^[5] They were the almost universal introductory literary texts for students, almost exclusively boys, from elite backgrounds and even for a number of ordinary villagers. Each was available in many versions, printed cheaply and available to all since they did not become superseded. When a student had memorized all three, he had a knowledge of roughly 2,000 characters. Since Chinese did not use an alphabet, this was an effective, though time-consuming, way of giving a crash course in character recognition before going on to understanding texts and writing characters.^[6]

Form[]

The work is a rhyming poem in lines of eight characters. The surnames are not listed in order of commonality. According to Song dynasty scholar Wang Mingqing (王明清), the first four surnames listed represent the most important families in the empire at the time:^[7]

• 1st: Zhao (趙) is the surname of the Song dynasty emperors.
• 2nd: Qian (錢) is the surname of the kings of Wuyue.
• 3rd: Sun (孫) is the surname of the queen Sun Taizhen of Wuyue king Qian Chu.
• 4th: Li (李) is the surname of the kings of Southern Tang.

The next four, Zhou 周, Wu 吳, Zheng 鄭, and Wang 王, were the surnames of the other wives of Qian Chu, the last king of Wuyue.^[8]

Complete text[]

This text is written in Traditional Chinese. Note that several of these characters may link to the same article.

Prevalence in Modern times[]

Under 300th most common^{[citation needed]}[]

• Yōng 雍 - 339th
• 平 - Ping - 315
• 米 316th
• 湛 369th

Under 400th most common[]

The following surnames are not among the 400 most common surnames according to a 2013 study^{[citation needed]}:

See also[]

• Chinese surnames
• List of common Chinese surnames
• Seek for Surname History
• Three Character Classic
• Thousand Character Classic

Notes[]

References[]

Citations[]

Sources[]

External links[]

Chinese Wikisource has original text related to this article: Hundred Family Surnames

• Hundred Family Surnames public domain audiobook at LibriVox in mandarin