Names and nationalities

The family name is 姓 xìng, and the character deserves a closer look: the woman, 女, next to “to be born”, 生 ⟶ “born of a woman”. The oldest known surnames, 姬 Jī, 姜 Jiāng, 姚 Yáo or 嬴 Yíng, all carry this radical. People often see in it the trace of a society in which the name was passed down through the mother. I am not so sure: the character says first of all that the name comes from birth, and historians are far from agreeing among themselves. The given name, for its part, is 名 míng, and the traditional explanation is a pretty one: in the evening, 夕, you can no longer make out faces, so you have to say your name with your mouth, 口.

The first habit to get into: in Chinese, the surname always comes first. In 李明 Lǐ Míng, 李 is the surname and 明 the given name, which is why Mao Zedong really is “Mr Mao”. Between colleagues or friends, you put 老 “old” or 小 “little” before the surname, depending on age: 老王 Lǎo Wáng for the elder, 小李 Xiǎo Lǐ for the younger, with nothing offensive about it (with a woman, people are more careful: nobody likes being made older). To ask someone's name politely, you use 贵姓 guìxìng, already seen on the page Social life, and the modest answer is 免贵姓王, “no ‘precious’ needed, my name is Wang”. Note too that in mainland China a married woman keeps her own name: nobody becomes “Mrs Wang” by marrying Mr Wang.

There are few surnames in China, which makes life genuinely hard for anyone trying to remember their colleagues. According to the official 2020 report, 王, 李, 张, 刘 and 陈 alone cover nearly one Chinese person in three. Hence the expression 张三李四 Zhāng Sān Lǐ Sì, “Zhang the third, Li the fourth” ⟶ Tom, Dick and Harry. The little book that lists them, the 百家姓 Bǎijiāxìng, dates from the Song and opens with 赵钱孙李: 赵 comes first because it was the name of the imperial family. A few surnames are written with two characters, the 复姓 fùxìng: 司马 as in the historian Sima Qian, 诸葛 as in the strategist Zhuge Liang, 欧阳 as in the scholar Ouyang Xiu.

The given name, on the other hand, is free. No calendar of saints to choose from: parents compose a name of one or two characters, loaded with a wish, its 寓意 yùyì. The flip side of this freedom is 重名 chóngmíng. With the fashion for one-character given names, some full names are shared by hundreds of thousands of people (张伟 is often quoted, if I am not mistaken the most common in the country). In the past, large families fixed a generation character, 字辈 zìbèi, shared by all the cousins of the same generation. And people avoided writing the emperor's name, which is 避讳 bìhuì: under the Tang, so they say, 观世音 became 观音 so as not to use the 世 of Emperor 李世民.

Scholars of old had several names. The 名 was given at birth; the 字 zì, received on reaching adulthood, was used in social life; the 号 hào was one you chose yourself. Li Bai was called 李白, his 字 was 太白 and his 号 青莲居士, “the Hermit of the Blue Lotus”. Confucius, 孔丘 by name, had 字 仲尼. Calling an equal by his 名 was rude: only his parents, his master or the man himself could use it. Today, children have a pet name, 小名 xiǎomíng, often a doubled syllable (豆豆, 乐乐), and many office workers give themselves an 英文名 Yīngwénmíng at work: Jack Ma is 马云.

The other way round, a foreigner is given a 中文名 Zhōngwénmíng, usually based on the pronunciation of their first name (this is what our Chinese Name generator does). Countries went the same way, but with carefully chosen characters: 美国 comes from 美利坚, 英国 from 英吉利, 德国 from 德意志, 法国 from 法兰西. These are shortened transcriptions, nothing more. On the other hand, chance has done things nicely: France becomes “the country of law”, Germany “the country of virtue”, and the United States “the beautiful country” (people also used to say 花旗国, “the country of the flowery flag”). Japan is the exception, with a real meaning: 日本 Rìběn, “the origin of the sun”.

Be careful with the question 你是哪里人 nǐ shì nǎli rén: asked of a Chinese person, it is not about the country but about the province or the city. And the answer often follows the 籍贯 jíguàn, the place of origin of the father's family, rather than the place of birth: you can be born in Beijing and say you are from Shandong. The difference between locals, 本地人 běndìrén, and people from elsewhere, 外地人 wàidìrén, is still very much felt. Outside China, a distinction is made between the 华侨 Huáqiáo, who has kept Chinese nationality, and the 华裔 Huáyì, of Chinese descent but a citizen of another country. As for the 海归 hǎiguī, “back from the sea”, he comes home with a degree from abroad, and the word sounds just like 海龟, the sea turtle, which comes back to lay its eggs on the beach where it was born. Many end up, as the proverb says, with 落叶归根 luò yè guī gēn, the fallen leaf going back to its root: that is the whole subject of He Zhizhang's poem, on our page Return to My Homeland - He Zhizhang.

That leaves one saying of Confucius which the Chinese still quote, and which closes our examples: 名不正则言不顺. On our page Chapter 13 of the Analects of Confucius, Couvreur renders it like this: “if names do not suit things, there is confusion in language”. Zilu had just asked the Master what he would begin with if he were to govern. The answer: by giving each thing its true name. Zilu found that rather theoretical (you can see why). But the idea has run through two thousand years of political thought: a prince who does not behave like a prince no longer deserves the name. It lives on in the chengyu 名正言顺 míng zhèng yán shùn, “the right name, the words flow” ⟶ legitimate, above board.

The peoples of China and the languages of the world will have a page of their own.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order is shown stroke by stroke, with the arrow that gives the direction of the movement.