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Chinese names An introduction

Chinese names(xing ming) are different from Western ones.The family names(surnames) come first and given names come last.People usually ask each other’s ‘xing ming’ when they meet. If they share the same family name, they believe that their ancestors were relatives.

500 years ago. The family of Confucius is an example of Chinese family names. A young man can trace his family line to an ancestor who lived 2,500 years ago.It is like a tree: leaves, branches and roots are connected by the family name. 

There are supposedly more than 20,000 family names in China.The secret of where your ancestors came from and what they did are concealed in ‘xing ming’.