百家姓 [Bai Jia Xing]
The Hundred Surnames
 The
Hundred Surnames is a document written during in the tenth century. It lists
all of the known Chinese surnames in use at the time, which amounted to 438.
(The word hundred in the title is used to mean many or all. Thus many old books
use the term "hundred surnames" to mean the whole population.) The surnames are
given in a prescribed order and arranged in the form of a poem to facilitate
memorization by school children. The surnames are in no particular order but
there are two exceptions. The surname leading the pack is Zhao, which happens
to be be the surname of the Song dynasty, the ruling dynasty of the time. The
next several surnames also appear to be related to other important personages
of the era. The second exception is that all double-character surnames are
grouped near the end of the document. (They are highlighted in
violet below).
In the one thousand years since the document was produced, there have been many
new surnames in use. Recent surveys have identified over ten thousand surnames
but the importance of the document has not diminished. Surnames for the Hundred
Surnames still account for 90% of all Chinese surnames in use. In fact, the top
ten surnames account for 40% of the population.
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