Wang is China’s most common surname

Wang is now the most common surname in Beijing and nationwide, according to a citizen identity information center survey released on September 14. Beijing’s five most common surnames...

Wang is now the most common surname in Beijing and nationwide, according to a survey by the citizen identity information center, whose results were released on September 14.

Beijing’s five most common surnames are Wang, Zhang, Li, Liu and Zhao.

Beijing has 11.28 million registered Han residents with a total of 2,041 surnames. Wang and Zhang together account for 19.8% of the capital’s residents, with over a million people bearing each name. Sun, Gao and Ma also rank among the ten most common surnames in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and other northern areas.

Yuan Yida, head of the Chinese surname origins research center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Genetics, recently completed his two-year «Statistics of Chinese Surnames». China’s first frequency-ranked surname list covered nearly 300 million people nationwide. It recorded around 4,100 surnames, whereas historical documents contain over 24,000, meaning almost 20,000 have disappeared. Most of the 4,100 are written with one character, apart from two- and three-syllable surnames. Most surname characters are easy to write.

Source: People’s Daily