Jiang
江 — Jiāng
The 75th most common surname in China
75th of the 100 commonest surnames in mainland China (Ministry of Public Security top-100 report, edition released January 2020 for 2019, as tabulated by English Wikipedia). English Wikipedia puts the surname at 0.26% of the Han Chinese population; Chinese Wikipedia cites a 2007 Ministry of Public Security count placing it 74th on the mainland.
Where the name comes from
The surname comes from the state of Jiang (江國), a small polity ruled by the Ying (嬴) family, whose line was traced to Boyi — the same ancestral name as the ruling house of Qin. Jiang was destroyed by the state of Chu in 623 BC; its surviving inhabitants scattered into what is now Henan and took the name of their lost state as their clan name. The character itself is the word for the Yangtze, and by extension 'river'.
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 江.
- JiangMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
- KongCantonese — Hong Kong, Macau
- KangHokkien — Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia
- ChiangWade-Giles, Taiwan
The character
Outside a name, 江 is an ordinary word meaning river.
- Strokes
- 6
- Radical
- 氵
- As a word
- jiāng
Words built from 江
The character does ordinary work in the language too. Each of these is a real word you can look up.
Other surnames read “Jiang”
Romanised the same way, but a different character and a different family.