Eight Great Surnames of Chinese Antiquity
eight Han surnames in ancient Chinese characters
The eight great surnames of Chinese antiquity were among the most important Chinese surnames in Chinese antiquity. They are all Chinese ancestral surnames, and as such, have Chinese clan surnames branching off from them. During the earliest Chinese antiquity, Chinese society focused on women. Family names often passed from women to their children. Because of this phenomenon, these eight surnames have a component of their hanzi representing the character woman (女).
As of 2019, very few people had one of these surnames as a family name. An exception is the surnames Yao and Jiang. Of these, there are some well-known Chinese of modern times with these names today. One example is Yao Ming (姚明).
The eight surnames
姞 is also sometimes considered one of the eight great surnames of Chinese antiquity.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eight Great Surnames of Chinese Antiquity” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.