History has its own life, it is like a person, both easy-going and self-respecting. ——Yu Qiuyu
A surname is a sign and symbol of a person's family kinship, which is passed down from ancestors. Except in special cases, it is generally not easily modified. Surnames do not distinguish between nobles and lows, but originally very common surnames, once a person with a certain surname becomes an emperor, then the surname will be worth more.
The Hundred Family Names is an essay about Chinese surnames, which, according to historical records, was written around the beginning of the Song Dynasty. "Zhao Qiansun Li, Zhou Wu Zheng Wang..." This is the opening content. The order in which the surnames appear here is not in order of population, but according to the social status of the surname.
For example, the first Zhao surname, because the founding emperor of the Song Dynasty was Zhao Kuangyin, so the Zhao surname ranked first. The second in line qian, that is, the surname of Qian Wei, the founding emperor of the Wuyue State. The surname "Qian" ranked second, but it was because the common people at that time supported the choice made by King Qian for the peaceful reunification of China. (After the establishment of the Song Dynasty, Wu Yueguo chose to submit to the Great Song, and the two sides did not solve it by force))
So which emperors in history have the most surnames? The answer is liu and li. According to the latest data, the total population of Liu surnamed Liu is about 64.6 million, ranking fourth in the country in total. In history, there were a total of 92 emperors surnamed Liu, the first emperor surnamed Liu was Liu Bang, the high ancestor of the Han Dynasty, in addition to the Western Han Dynasty, the dynasties established by Liu surnames also included Xuan Han, Eastern Han, Shu Han, Han (Former Zhao), (Liu) Song, Southern Han, Later Han, Northern Han and so on.
In the second place, surnamed Li, there have been a total of 58 emperors in history. The first emperor surnamed Li was Li Xian, and in the last year of the new dynasty, Li Xian, the leader of the peasant revolt, proclaimed himself the King of Huainan in the first year of the new dynasty. In the third year of Jianwu (27 AD), he established himself as the Son of Heaven, placed a hundred officials as a secretary of state, and embraced nine cities, with more than 100,000 people. The second dynasty was the Cheng han dynasty, followed by the Dashun regimes of the Tang Dynasty, The Western Liang, the Later Tang, the Southern Tang, the Western Xia, and Li Zicheng.
Today, the total population of Li surname in China is 95.3 million, ranking first in the number of Chinese and the first of the hundred family names worthy of the name.