A traditional
It's a long-established tradition
Until the mid-1900s in China, a person usually had three names besides his or her surname: ming, zi and hao. Ming is the name given by parents; Zi is the name granted to a person at the beginning of adulthood – men usually at the age of 20 and women at 15.
While the vast majority of Han Chinese names consist of two or three characters, there are some Han Chinese with longer names, up to 15 characters.
In Chinese, names consist usually of two, three, or occasionally four monosyllabic characters. Surnames, or xìng (姓), generally come first and in most cases consist of one character.
As a majority of Chinese surnames are one syllable, if you see a three-syllable Chinese name, for instance Wang Xiaoming, the two-syllable name Xiaoming is the given name, and the one-syllable name Wang is the family name.
The character biáng requires 62 total strokes to write and contains a 馬 horse, 月 moon,刂 knife and 心 heart plus other radicals. Biáng doesn't exist in Modern Standard Mandarin which only serves to increase the mystery and intrigue surrounding the character.
Chinese names are traditionally patrilineal, whereby children are given their father's family name at birth. Women do not change their legal names at marriage. However, some may choose to place their husband's family name before their full name.
The first part is the generation name that is shared by all members of a generation, and the last character is given to the individual person. The reason Chinese people write their surname first is to show respect to the ancestors.
Many of these compound surnames derive from Zhou dynasty Chinese noble and official titles, professions, place names and other areas, to serve a purpose. Some are originally from various tribes that lived in ancient China, while others were created by joining two one-character family names.
The order that the three name elements appears is important. Chinese surnames usually come first, followed by the given name. In our earlier example, Chan Tai Man, Chan is the surname while Tai Man is the given name.
The use of Western names thus serves as a buffer, to avoid being too formal and too intimate, and to avoid the embarrassing situation of addressing someone mistakenly as in downward communication.
Zhāng Wěi 张伟, Wáng Wěi 王伟, and Lǐ Nà 李娜 are the three most common full names.
Often romanticized as Lee, Li is an enduring masculine name both within Chinese and western culture.
Li or Lee ([lì]; Chinese: 李; pinyin: Lǐ) is a common Chinese surname, it is the 4th name listed in the famous Hundred Family Surnames. Li is one of the most common surnames in Asia, shared by 92.76 million people in China, and more than 100 million in Asia.
A traditional Chinese name has three parts: a surname, a generational name which is the first character of the given name, and a personal name which is the second character of the given name. The generational name or zibei (字輩) is carried by all males within a family's generation.
Xiao is a common last name found among Overseas Chinese communities around the world. In fact, "Xiao" is the transliteration of several different Chinese surnames.
The three most common surnames in Mainland China are Li, Wang and Zhang, which make up 7.9%, 7.4% and 7.1% respectively. Together they number close to 300 million and are easily the most common surnames in the world.
We usually address friends in Chinese by his or her first name omitting the surname. If we are close to each other, we may also call his or her childhood nickname.
To choose a Chinese name for yourself, first start with your surname. You will most likely want to choose from one of the 100 most common Chinese surnames, which actually make up 87% of the population. Usually you would want to choose a surname that sounds similar to your own last name.
A Chinese prefix used with a shortened form of peoples' given names to express familiarity, roughly equivalent to Mister or Miss.
For people of Chinese descent, however, having more than one name was common. Consider Sun Yat-sen, the “father of modern China”, who was known by multiple names (most of which are rendered in pinyin here for convenience).
#1: biáng. The Chinese character “biáng,” used to represent Biang Biang noodles, is one of the most complex and rare Chinese characters. It has 56 strokes and cannot be found in modern dictionaries or entered into computers.
There are many variations of the character for biáng, but the most widely accepted version is made up of 58 strokes in its traditional form (42 in simplified Chinese). It is one of the most complex Chinese characters in modern usage, although it is not found in modern dictionaries or even in the Kangxi dictionary.