Chinese Festival

CHINESE NAMES

I. FAMILY NAMES

1. In China family names of the Han Chinese (which account for about 92% of the total population of the country) are before given names.

2. At present there are about 3,000 family names for the Han Chinese, of which 300 are the most common.

2. Most Chinese family names have only one character. However, about 20 double-character family names have survived into the modern time. Some famous ones include Sima, Zhuge, Ouyang and Situ, etc..

3. There are family names with three or more characters, but those are extremely rare and are not ethnically Han Chinese.

II. CHINESE GIVEN NAMES

Chinese given names are made up of one or two characters.

1. Unlike the Western convention, it is extremely frowned upon to name a person after someone else.

2. There are age- old conventions about Chinese characters chosen for given names, e.g.___

(1) Given Names for Male

Characters meaning wealth, wisdom, courage, strength, ambition and glorification of ancestry are favoured given names for male. For instance,

富 (wealth)

贵 (honour)

发财 (get rich)

智 (wisdom), 聪 (intelligent), 敏 (smart)

勇 (brave), 壮 (strong), 力 (strength)

志远, 宏志, 鹏飞, 远大 (great ambition)

(2) Given Names for Female

It is frequently the case that girls will be given names which reflect "feminine"

characteristics or be named after plants or flowers.

丽, 佳, 媛, 秀 (beauty)

贞, 淑, 洁, 贤 (virtue, morality, purity)

兰 (orchid), 梅 (plum), 莉 (jasmine), 菊 (chrysanthemum), 莲(lotus)

In the old days it was very common, especially for poor and illiterate women to have their names composed up of three characters as follows.

Family name of the husband + family name of herself + Shi (氏)：

张王氏

3. Generation names

In some families, the first of the two characters in the personal name is shared by all members of a generation. Generation names are also known as Ban Bei (班辈: rank status seniority) and were worked out long in advance. In some families there is a small number of cycled generational names. Generation names may be a poem about the hope, motto or history of the family. For instance, the following characters from Confucian doctrine may be used for this purpose.

忠(Loyalty), 孝 (Filial Piety), 节 (Chastity), 义(Faith)Ð'...

The sequence of the characters should never be changed, the importance of which is that a person with a previous character as his/her middle name is in a senior generation than the one whose middle name (i.e. the character in this sequence) is behind. For instance,

王忠明 (grandfather)

王孝康 (father)