Hundred Family Surnames
The Hundred Family Surnames (Chinese: 百家姓; pinyin: Bǎijiāxìng) is a classic Chinese text composed of common Chinese surnames. The book was composed in the early Song Dynasty.[1] It originally contained 411 surnames, and was later expanded to 504.[1] Of these, 444 are single-character surnames, and 60 are double-character surnames. About 800 names have been derived from the original ones.[2]
In the dynasties following the Song, the Three Character Classic, the Hundred Family Surnames, and Thousand Character Classic came to be known as San Bai Qian (Three, Hundred, Thousand), from the first character in their titles. They were the almost universal introductory literary texts for students, almost exclusively boys, from elite backgrounds and even for a number of ordinary villagers. Each was available in many versions, printed cheaply, and available to all since they did not become superseded. When a student had memorized all three, he had a knowledge of roughly 2,000 characters. Since Chinese did not use an alphabet, this was an effective, though time consuming, way of giving a "crash course" in character recognition before going on to understanding texts and writing characters. [3]
The Hundred Family Surnames was translated into Manchu as ᠪᡝ ᡤᡳᠶᠠ ᠰᡳᠩ (Wylie: Pe giya sing, Möllendorff: Be giya sing).
Form
The work is a rhyming poem in lines of eight characters. The surnames are not listed in order of commonality. According to Song dynasty scholar Wang Mingqing (王明清), the first four surnames listed represent the most important families in the empire at the time:[4]
- 1st: Zhao (趙) is the surname of the Song Dynasty emperors.
- 2nd: Qian (錢) is the surname of the kings of Wuyue.
- 3rd: Sun (孫) is the surname of the queen of Wuyue.
- 4th: Li (李) is the surname of the kings of Southern Tang.
The next four, Zhou 周, Wu 吳, Zheng 鄭, and Wang 王, were the surnames of the other wives of Qian Chu, the last king of Wuyue.[5]
Complete text
This text is written in traditional Chinese.
See also
- Chinese surname
- List of common Chinese surnames
- Seek for Surname History
- Three Character Classic
- Thousand Character Classic
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 K. S. Tom. [1989] (1989). Echoes from Old China: Life, Legends and Lore of the Middle Kingdom. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1285-9.
- ↑ Chen, Janey. [1992] (1992). A Practical English-Chinese Pronouncing Dictionary. Tuttle Publishing. ISBN 0-8048-1877-0
- ↑ Rawski (1979), pp. 46-48.
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- ↑ The last four-character line means "thus ends the Hundred Family Surnames." It is not intended to contain surnames.
References
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External links
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Chinese Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
Hundred Surnames public domain audiobook at LibriVox in mandarin
