He
何 — Hé
The 17th most common surname in China
17th most common surname in mainland China (Ministry of Public Security national name report for 2019, released January 2020). A 2012 survey put the figure at about 14 million bearers (reported in The Atlantic's "China's Surnames", 2013).
Where the name comes from
何 is a surname created by a mishearing. When Qin destroyed the state of Han (韓) in 230 BC, members of its royal house — descendants of King An of Han — scattered into the Jiang-Huai region between the Yangtze and the Huai, where the local speech rendered 韓 as 何, and the new character stuck; the Chinese sources put it as 「江淮間音，以韓為何，遂為何氏」. Later arrivals joined the name: Xianbei families surnamed Heba (賀拔) and Tang-era Sogdian merchants of the "Nine Surnames of Zhaowu" also took 何. The clan's traditional seat is Lujiang commandery in Anhui.
The same name, spelled differently
A Chinese surname is a character, not a spelling. The Latin letters on a passport come from whichever dialect the name was written down from — so these are all 何.
- HeMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
- HoCantonese — Hong Kong and Macau
The character
Outside a name, 何 is an ordinary word meaning what.
- Strokes
- 7
- Radical
- 亻
- As a word
- hé
Words built from 何
The character does ordinary work in the language too. Each of these is a real word you can look up.
Other surnames read “He”
Romanised the same way, but a different character and a different family.