List of common Chinese surnames

These are lists of the most common Chinese surnames in the People's Republic of China ("China"), Republic of China ("Taiwan"), and the Chinese diaspora overseas as provided by authoritative government or academic sources. Chinese names also form the basis for many common Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese surnames in both translation and transliteration into those languages.

The conception of China as consisting of the "old 100 families" (Chinese: 老百姓; pinyin: Lǎo Bǎi Xìng; literally: "Old Hundred Surnames") is an ancient and traditional one, the most notable tally being the Song-era Hundred Family Surnames (Chinese: 百家姓; pinyin: Bǎi Jiā Xìng). Even today, the number of surnames in China is a little over 4,000, while the year 2000 US census found the number of American surnames held by at least 100 people to be more than 150,000 and more than 6.2 million surnames altogether.

The Chinese expression "Three Zhang (or/and) Four Li" (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Zhāng Sān Lǐ Sì) is used to mean "anyone" or "everyone", but the most common surnames are currently Wang in mainland China and Chen in Taiwan. A commonly cited factoid from the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records estimated that Zhang was the most common surname in the world, but no comprehensive information from China was available at the time and more recent editions have not repeated the claim. However, Zhang Wei () is the most common full name in mainland China.

...
Wikipedia