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Ancient Chinese names traditionally consisted of three parts: the family name (xìng), given name (míng), and often a courtesy name (zì) granted at age 20 for men, making some individuals known by up to five different names throughout their lives.
The famous Song Dynasty text 'Hundred Family Surnames' (960-1279 CE) catalogued that just 100 surnames accounted for approximately 85% of China's population, with Wang, Li, and Zhang being the most common.
Many Chinese clans used a predetermined poem or sequence of characters where each generation shared the same character in their given name, allowing genealogists to identify family relationships spanning 20-30 generations.
During imperial times, it was forbidden and punishable by death to use the personal names of the emperor or one's ancestors in writing or speech, forcing millions to alter their names during each new reign.
Ancient Chinese women often lost their given names after marriage, being referred to only as 'Lady [Surname]' or by their relationship to males, with many historical women's birth names forever unrecorded.
The earliest recorded Chinese surnames date back to oracle bone inscriptions from 1200 BCE during the Shang Dynasty, making Chinese surnames among the oldest continuously used family names in the world.
Traditional naming practices incorporated the Wu Xing (Five Elements: metal, wood, water, fire, earth) system, with parents consulting the elements present in a child's birth time to choose balancing characters, a practice spanning over 2,000 years.
While two-character given names became popular after the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), single-character names were preferred during the Three Kingdoms period, with only 23% of recorded nobles using two-character given names.
Famous Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai (701-762 CE) had at least four different names including his milk name, given name, courtesy name, and literary name, each used in specific social contexts and carrying distinct meanings.
In ancient times, children were sometimes temporarily named by their birth order using numbers (Bo for first, Zhong for second, Shu for third, Ji for fourth) until a formal naming ceremony, typically held 100 days after birth.
Before the Zhou Dynasty (1046 BCE), ancient Chinese distinguished between xìng (maternal clan names, often containing the 'woman' radical 女) and shì (patrilineal family names), with over 22 ancient matrilineal surnames identified in historical texts.
Emperor Qin Shi Huang standardized the naming system in 221 BCE, reducing thousands of clan designations to a unified surname system and establishing rules that influenced Chinese naming conventions for the next 2,200 years.
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