Where the name comes from
The surname comes from the state of Qin. In the 9th century BC King Xiao of Zhou granted Feizi — a descendant of Boyi, of the ancestral name Ying (嬴) — a small fief called Qin in what is now Zhangjiachuan County, Gansu; that fief grew into the state that eventually unified China, and after the Qin dynasty fell in 206 BC its royal descendants, whose ancestral name was Ying, took Qin as their family name. A second, separate line comes from Qin City in the state of Lu (present-day Fan County, Henan): Boqin, son of the Duke of Zhou, received Lu, and those of his descendants assigned to the Qin estate took the place name as their surname. Some Silk Road arrivals, and later Mongol, Manchu and Jurchen families, also adopted it.
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 秦.
- QinMandarin — mainland China, Taiwan
- ChinTaiwan, and among overseas families in Singapore and Malaysia — e.g. the actor Charlie Chin (秦祥林)
The character
秦 is used almost only as a name — it carries no everyday meaning of its own.
- Strokes
- 10
- Radical
- 禾
- As a word
- qín
Other surnames read “Qin”
Romanised the same way, but a different character and a different family.