中國有多少姓氏?
It is human nature that inadvertently the question “how many Chinese surnames are there?” will be ask. It is a fair and legitimate question. With China conducting regular census one would expect this to be no more than a walk in the park. However, this is far from being the case.
The best known source for Chinese surnames is The Book of Hundred Family Surnames (百家姓) which was compiled during the Northern Song Dynasty has 438 surnames. Why was it titled hundred when its list is more than a hundred? With the old Chinese the word hundred was generally used to mean many not the actual number itself.
Dictionary of Modern Chinese (現代漢語辭典) listed 930 or just slightly more than double the number in the Book of Hundred Surnames. Another Song publication, Surnames Explained (姓解), collected 2,568 surnames or 8 times more than its better known counterpart. To muddy the water further, Key to Surnames, complied by Chen Sie-yuan (陳士元) during the Ming dynasty has 3,625 surnames.
Now LateLineNews (夜光新聞) reported that Chen Lipu (陳歷甫), a Chinese surnames specialist, after 30 plus years had collect 15,142 Chinese surnames. His recent published Chinese Surnames Dictionary (中華姓氏書法大辭典) is a collection of 10,129 surnames. Of this total over 8,000 are Han surnames and the balance belongs to the varies minorities living in China. This would be an interesting book to have since it would certainly would broaden any person’s knowledge of Chinese words.
Of course this doesn’t mean all these surnames are in use today. Or it is such a rarity that one may never encounter such a person. Of the 400-odd surnames in The Book of Hundred Family Surnames at least 76 are not in use and exist in the book only. An example of which is the surname Hung (紅) as in the colour red not Hung (洪) which means big. Just trying to remember when was the last time I encountered somebody with such as surname. Can anybody out there help?
I’m interested in the surname Hung, as it’s mine. I can’t find anywhere in our family papers where the Chinese character is shown.
I assume it’s the one that means large (or torrent, flood) because as you say the one that means red seems not to be in use as a surname.
I’m wondering if we’re related to Hung Hsiu Chuan from the Taiping Rebellion…