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No.1 surname in China gone from Zhao to Li

By An Wei: 0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, April 12, 2013

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The latest ranking of China's One Hundred Family Surnames based on the Ministry of Public Security's surname statistics was recently released. These 100 most common surnames cover 87% of the total national population in today's China.

The three big surnames include 270 million people

According to the sample research of the third population census conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics in 1982, the three "biggest" surnames currently are Li, Wang and Zhang, accounting for 7.9%, 7.4% and 7.1% of the total population respectively. The number of people holding one of these names has thus far reached 270 million, consequently making these three groups the biggest groups of people sharing the same surname in the world.

Surnames unevenly distributed from south to north

In the northern regions, Wang is the No.1 surname, covering 9.9% of the population, followed by Li, Zhang and Liu. In the southern regions, Chen is No.1, including 10.6% of the population, followed by Li, Huang, Lin and Zhang. In the Yangtze River area, the top surname is Li, which took up 7% of the population, followed by Wang, Zhang, Chen and Liu.

Why "Zhao" is the top name in the previous Hundred Family Surnames

Many people do not understand that in ancient times, people holding the surname Zhao did not make up the largest group of people sharing the same last name. Why then was Zhao at the top spot of the Hundred Family Surnames?

The reason was that the "Hundred Family Surnames" list was edited during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and its emperors went by the last name of Zhao. The name was therefore ranked to be the most important of all surnames – a token of respect towards the emperors. The newly released Hundred Family Surnames ranking, however, was created on the basis of statistics.

New Hundred Family Surnames

Li(李) Wang(王) Zhang(张) Liu(刘) Chen(陈)

Yang(杨) Huang(黄) Zhao(赵) Zhou(周) Wu(吴)

Xu(徐) Sun(孙) Zhu(朱) Ma(马) Hu(胡)

Guo(郭) Lin(林) He(何) Gao(高) Liang(梁)

Zheng(郑) Luo(罗) Song(宋) Xie(谢) Tang(唐)

Han(韩) Cao(曹) Xu(许) Deng(邓) Xiao(萧)

Feng(冯) Zeng(曾) Cheng(程) Cai(蔡) Peng(彭)

Pan(潘) Yuan(袁) Yu(于) Dong(董) Yu(余)

Su(苏) Ye(叶) Lyu(吕) Wei(魏) Jiang(蒋)

Tian(田) Du(杜) Ding(丁) Shen(沈) Jiang(姜)

Fan(范) Jiang(江) Fu(傅) Zhong(钟) Lu(卢)