Li

Where the name comes from

The name began as an office, not a place. Gao Yao served as Dali (大理), the minister of law or "great judge", under Emperor Yao; his descendants held the post for generations and took it as their clan name, Li (理). The ninth-century Yuanhe Xing Zuan makes this a branch of the ancient Ying (嬴) clan descended from Emperor Zhuanxu. Tradition then explains the switch to the homophonous 李 ("plum") through a descendant fleeing the Shang court who survived on wild plums, and the Daoist philosopher Li Er — Laozi — is revered as the surname's founding ancestor.

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 李.

• LiMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
• LeeTaiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia
• LeiCantonese — Macau
• LieIndonesia

The character

Outside a name, 李 is an ordinary word meaning plum.

Strokes

7

Radical

木

Words built from 李

The character does ordinary work in the language too. Each of these is a real word you can look up.

Other surnames read “Li”

Romanised the same way, but a different character and a different family.