Hundred Family Surnames

The Hundred Family Surnames (Chinese: 百家姓), commonly known as Bai Jia Xing,^[1] also translated as Hundreds of Chinese Surnames,^[2] is a classic Chinese text composed of common Chinese surnames. An unknown author compiled the book during the Song dynasty (960–1279).^[3] The book lists 507 surnames.^[3] Of these, 441 are single-character surnames and 66 are double-character surnames.^[3] About 800 names have been derived from the original ones.^[4]

In the dynasties following the Song, the 13th-century Three Character Classic, the Hundred Family Surnames, and the 6th-century Thousand Character Classic came to be known as San Bai Qian (Three, Hundred, Thousand), from the first character in their titles. They served as instructional books for children,^[5] becoming the almost universal introductory literary texts for students (almost exclusively boys) from elite backgrounds and even for a number of ordinary villagers. Each text was available in many versions, printed cheaply and available to all since they did not become superseded. When a student had memorized all three, he had a knowledge of roughly 2,000 characters. Since Chinese did not use an alphabet, this was an effective, though time-consuming, way of giving a crash course in character-recognition before going on to understanding texts and writing characters.^[6]