A hundred surname pages, a guide to how Chinese names are built, and the numbers — including the ones that are not written the way you would guess. This is the reference section people actually arrive on from a search.
Without a plan: All hundred surname pages, and the numbers
How a Chinese name is built
Family name first, given name second — the reverse of the European order, and not a stylistic choice you can ignore. 王小明 is Mr Wang, not Mr Ming.
Surnames are overwhelmingly one character; given names are usually two, occasionally one. That asymmetry is the quickest way to parse an unfamiliar name: a three-character name is almost always one-character surname plus two-character given name, and the handful of two-character surnames are worth learning precisely because they break the rule.
The hundred most common surnames
One page each, ranked from the most common down. Chinese surnames are startlingly concentrated — a small number of them cover a very large share of the population — so a hundred pages is not a long tail, it is most of the people you will ever be introduced to.
Each page carries where the name came from, how many people carry it with the figure quoted to its source and date rather than asserted, one genuinely surprising checkable fact, and the romanisations.
Why the same surname is spelled five ways
Because the spelling on a passport records which language the family spoke, not which character they are. 李 is Li in Mandarin pinyin, Lee from Hong Kong or Korea, Ly in Vietnamese usage, Lei in Macau.
The surname pages list those spellings with the speech community that produces each one, which is the half that is actually useful: a list of spellings tells you the variants exist, and naming the community tells you what you have just learned about the person who handed you the card.
The numbers
Counting in Chinese is easy until it is not. One to ten are trivial and entirely regular up to a hundred, which makes Chinese numbers one of the few genuinely free wins in the language.
The part that trips everyone is the grouping. Chinese counts in ten-thousands — 万 — not thousands, so large numbers do not map onto English groupings and converting them live is a real skill rather than a lookup. There is also a formal set of digits used on cheques and contracts specifically because they cannot be altered with a pen stroke, and the hand gestures for one to ten, which are used constantly in markets and are not the ones you would guess.
If you are choosing a Chinese name
- Pick a real surname — From the hundred. An invented surname reads as invented immediately, in a way an unusual given name does not.
- Let the sound be approximate — A name that transliterates your own exactly and means something absurd is worse than one that sounds roughly similar and reads as a name.
- Check what the characters say together — Each character is fine on its own and the pair is what people read. This is the step that goes wrong.
- Say it out loud to someone — Tones and homophones do things on the ear that they do not do on the page.
Common questions
Family before individual, which is the ordering the whole naming system assumes. It is not reversible for politeness, and reversing it in Chinese is simply a different name.