Chinese surnames are characters with claims: 王 Wang is "king," 林 Lin is "forest," 赵 Zhao is an ancient state. Every name below shows the character, the pinyin, and what the character means.
What are common Chinese last names?
Wang, Li and Zhang lead the national register, and they lead it by millions. The table below runs in commonness order, and every row is a receipt: the character, the pinyin reading, the meaning. Copy any row, or the whole set, and paste it anywhere.
The top of the ranked list: the national commonness order.
Chinese last names with hanzi, pinyin and meanings
Wang 王, with more than 100 million bearers. Li and Zhang follow within a few million, and the three of them together name roughly one in five people in the country. The top ten, in order:
The ten most common Chinese last names
Rank
Name
Hanzi
Meaning
1
Wang
王
king
2
Li
李
plum
3
Zhang
张
stretch, to draw a bow
4
Liu
刘
battle-axe
5
Chen
陈
to display; old
6
Yang
杨
poplar tree
7
Huang
黄
yellow
8
Zhao
赵
the ancient state of Zhao
9
Wu
吴
the ancient state of Wu
10
Zhou
周
the Zhou dynasty; circumference
The order matches the master table above: one dataset, no contradictions.
How do Chinese last names work?
The family name comes first: in print, in speech, in official registers. Wang Zhiqiang is Zhiqiang of the Wang household, family name leading.
Most surnames are one character, and each is a full word in its own right: a king, a forest, a plum, an axe. They arrived as fiefs, places, offices and descriptions in the first millennium BCE, then froze. The classical register, the Baijiaxing or Hundred Family Surnames, was memorized as a rhymed poem for centuries, which is why the set feels so stable today.
Women keep their birth surnames on marriage. Children usually take the father's. The everyday word for the family name is xing (姓), and the register below is exactly that: the xing, in commonness order.
What do Chinese last names mean?
They mean what their characters say, and the characters sort into families. Read the parts and you read the oldest documented fact about the family: a fief, an office, a landscape. The facets below slice the master table by origin family. Here's the concentration story worth knowing first: Wang, Li and Zhang each sit above 90 million bearers, the top ten cover close to 40 percent of the population, and the top hundred cover the large majority. That spread is the Chinese register's signature fact, and the reason a shared surname in China implies no recent kinship.
State names: the ancient fiefs
Chinese last names from ancient states
Last name
Hanzi
Meaning
Zhao
赵
the ancient state of Zhao
Wu
吴
the ancient state of Wu
Zheng
郑
the ancient state of Zheng
Song
宋
the ancient state of Song
Han
韩
the ancient state of Han
Wei
魏
the ancient state of Wei
Nature names: mountains, water, trees
Chinese last names from nature characters
Last name
Hanzi
Meaning
Lin
林
forest
Ye
叶
leaf
Cui
崔
lofty mountain
Long
龙
dragon
Sheng
盛
flourishing
Ke
柯
axe handle
Office names: the old jobs
Chinese last names from offices and duties
Last name
Hanzi
Meaning
Mao
毛
fur; spear
You
游
to swim, to roam
Zhu
祝
to pray; invoker
Yu
郁
fragrant, luxuriant
The given-name side of the system, what the two characters after the surname assert, is tabled on the Chinese name generator page.
What are rare Chinese last names?
The rarest layer is the compound surnames: two characters, one name. They number a few dozen in real use and are carried by tiny populations. Several were offices, several were Xianbei clan titles absorbed into the Han register. Five examples, each with its receipt:
Rare compound Chinese last names
Rare surname
Hanzi
Origin
Sima
司马
marshal, controller of horses
Situ
司徒
minister over the masses
Sikong
司空
minister of works
Weichi
尉迟
court inspector; a Xianbei clan title
Murong
慕容
a Xianbei clan name
The rare-surname story continues across cultures on the rare last names page.
How do Chinese last names differ from Korean last names?
Both systems put the family name first; the concentration runs opposite ways. China spreads across thousands of surnames; Korea stacks half its population into three.
Chinese versus Korean surname systems
Attribute
Chinese
Korean
Diversity
Thousands in modern use
About 280 surnames
Concentration
Top surname above 100 million bearers
Half the population in Kim, Lee, Park
Structure
One character, mostly
One syllable, mostly
Writing
Hanzi, written daily
Hangul writes the name; hanja sits behind it
Compound layer
A few dozen two-character names
Rare, mostly two-syllable names
Neighbors, different shapes. The Korean side of the comparison lives at korean last names.
Can you generate a Chinese last name?
Yes, two ways. The Chinese name generator has a family-name mode: every draw is a surname built from real characters, with its receipt. Or run the last name generator with a Chinese filter when you're naming across cultures and want the filter in one place.
Open these in the generator. Every draw keeps its character receipt, and the kept-names shelf holds your shortlist for the session.
Wang 王. It sits first in the national register with more than 100 million bearers, and Li and Zhang sit within a few million of it. The top three together name roughly one in five people in China.
How many Chinese last names exist?
Thousands in modern use, out of over 5,000 documented. The classical Baijiaxing, the Hundred Family Surnames poem, lists 504. About 100 of today's surnames cover the large majority of the population.
Why do so many Chinese last names mean places or states?
Because surnames were granted by fief. A family that held the state of Zhao took Zhao as its name. The ancient states, mountains, rivers and cities of early China still account for a large share of the register.
Do Chinese women change their last name when married?
No. Women keep their birth surnames. The custom passes the family name through the father's line, but a married woman does not take her husband's surname. Children usually take the father's.
Where this data comes from.Surnames, characters and meanings are compiled from published Chinese surname references and the classical Baijiaxing register; the commonness order tracks national statistics. Compound surnames with debated analyses are glossed by their documented function. Where these names come from →