Where do I come from? — A family name is a road walked for thousands of years.
For the Chinese, a surname is a genealogy carried on one's back. It records a fief granted, a migration made, a voyage to the South Seas; it records the three characters a family still wrote above the ancestral hall door in a new land — the commandery, the hall name, the ancestral home.
This archive follows the March 2026 household-registration statistics of the Ministry of Public Security and covers the forty largest surnames. For each: origins, migration, commandery seats, hall names and family precepts — with key Nanyang (Southeast Asian) Chinese surnames flagged, offering overseas Chinese a thread to follow home.
First, the key distinction: in high antiquity "xing" and "shi" were two different things; only after the Qin-Han era did they slowly merge into one "surname." This is the point people most often get wrong.
Xing is extremely old, a product of matrilineal society — in those clans people knew their mothers, not their fathers; xing marked bloodlines and prevented marriage within the clan. Hence the oldest xing carry the "woman" radical: Ji, Jiang, Si, Ying, Yun, Yao, Ji(姞). The Yellow Emperor was xing Ji; the Flame Emperor xing Jiang. Xing stood for the great blood clans, and they were few.
Shi came later, as branches of a xing once father-line society rose: as a great clan multiplied and split off, the branch that received a new fief took a new shi. Shi marked identity, land and lineage — status. The old rule: women were called by xing, men by shi.
Examples: the Zhou royal house was xing Ji; the branch enfeoffed at Lu took shi Lu, the branch at Jin took shi Jin — Ji is the xing; Lu and Jin are shi. Confucius: xing Zi, shi Kong. Qu Yuan: xing Mi, shi Qu.
The merger: war in the Warring States dissolved the aristocracy and the old marks of rank faded. By the Han, people no longer separated xing and shi, and the combined "xingshi" became today's family name.
The vast majority of today's surnames descend from the ancient shi, which came chiefly from six sources.
1) Fief and state names (the largest group): Qi, Lu, Song, Wu, Chu, Han, Zhao, Wei, Cai, Chen — a clan enfeoffed on that land took the state as its shi.
2) Hereditary office: Situ, Sima, Sikong, Sikou, Shi, Bu — generations in the same post, and the post became the name.
3) An ancestor's courtesy name, given name or posthumous title: Kong traces to Kong Fujia, Confucius' ancestor; Wen, Wu, Mu, Kang come from posthumous titles.
4) Dwelling places and landmarks: Ximen ("West Gate"), Dongguo, Guo, Liu, Qiu, Jiang, He — live by the west gate, and you are Ximen.
5) Trades and crafts: Tao (pottery), Bu (divination), Wu (invocation), Jiang (artisan).
6) Bestowals, naturalisation and name changes: emperors granted the imperial surname (the Tang granted Li); border peoples sinicised their names (the great renaming under Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei); some families changed names to escape disaster.
The ancient xing were few — a few dozen; the shi were many — thousands. Of today's hundreds of Chinese surnames, most descend from shi.
A surname is not an unchanging blood certificate: bestowals, adoptions and sinicisation all changed surnames across history. A surname is a cultural identity, not a genetic label — what it carries is culture, not merely blood.
Surnames and the stem-branch system are two independent cultural systems: surnames arose from blood, fiefs, offices and clans — they were not assigned by stems and branches. Shang kings used Heavenly Stems as temple names (Pan Geng, Wu Ding); that is a temple-name rule, not a rule of surname origin.
In ancient China, family names were divided into xing and shi. The early xing emerged in matrilineal clans to prevent intermarriage within the same bloodline. Later, shi developed as branches of a clan, derived from fiefs, official titles, ancestors' names and places of residence. After the Qin and Han dynasties, xing and shi merged into the modern family name system. Chinese surnames carry clan memories and cultural identity.
※ Most surnames have many lines of origin — we present the most widespread mainstream account, and genealogical records should remain the final authority.