China has thousands of years of civilization inheritance, and the cultural genes accumulated by history are not only imprinted in our blood, but also in our surname culture, we can also find the epitome of China's thousand-year civilization.
The surname is imprinted with the shadow of the matrilineal clan
Surname, born of man also. Because he was born with a surname, he was born from a woman. - "Explaining Words"
In ancient tribal times, there was no fixed marital relationship between people, and because men were responsible for hunting, they needed to travel for a long time, while women were responsible for staying behind to take care of children and gather food.
Therefore, on the bronze texts of the Western Zhou Dynasty that were unearthed later, most of the surnames that could be verified had female characters next to them, such as Jiang, Yao, Ji, Ji, Wa, Concubine, Concubine, Concubine, Concubine, Hao, and 嬴 (yes, that is, the surname of Qin Shi Huang). Therefore, at the beginning of a person, his (her) surname was determined by his mother, and later with the development of productivity, people gradually changed from a hunter-gatherer-oriented lifestyle to an agricultural-based lifestyle, and men with physical superiority became the core labor force of society.
The matrilineal clan has thus developed into a patrilineal clan, and the children's surname has thus been changed from following the mother to the father's surname, and the female character of the word "surname" has still been preserved, from which we can faintly see the historical traces of the Chinese matrilineal clan.
There was an explosion of surnames under the sub-feudal system
Bidding farewell to primitive society, people began to enter a new stage, new land was constantly reclaimed, and new populations were born, and the surnames originally produced according to the matrilineal clans could no longer meet the needs, so a new way of creating surnames was born:
Taking the ancestral fiefdom as a surname, such as the surname of Chen, it was Concubine Man (a descendant of Shun) who was sealed in Chen Land by King Wu of Zhou and established the "State of Chen". Later generations of descendants took the homeland as their clan and called it the Chen clan.
Take the name or character of the ancestor as the clan, such as king Zhou Ling had a son named Nianfu, and his descendants took Nian as the clan.
Taking the official position of the ancestor as the clan, such as Sima Yi in the Three Kingdoms period, "Sima " is the official position conferred by his ancestors as the clan. Similarly, there are Taishi, Situ and so on.
The above are common surname sources, in addition, there are clans with the order of brother clan ranking, such as Bo, Zhong, Uncle, Ji, etc., and those with occupations as clans such as Wu and Tu. During this period, the source of surnames increased rapidly, but the number of commonly used Chinese characters was limited after all, so different clans appeared, and for different reasons, they all adopted unified Chinese characters as surnames.
For example, the surname Zhang (see Note 1), one of the five major surnames in China, has a part derived from the ancestral official position, and the New Book of Tang dynasty and the Genealogy Table of The Prime Minister records:
The fifth son of the Yellow Emperor Shaohao Qingyang clan wielded the bow zheng and began to make the bow arrow, and the descendants were given the surname Zhang.
This means that one of the grandsons of the Yellow Emperor was given the title of Bow Zheng (an official position) for inventing the bow and arrow, and his descendants took "Zhang" as their clan. In addition, in the Jin Dynasty during the Spring and Autumn Period, there was a doctor named Xie Zhang, the character Zhang Hou, and some of his descendants took the ancestral character as their clan. So when we look at hundreds of family names, we often find that there will be multiple sources for the same surname.
To the ancestral fiefdom as the source of the surname, the vast majority of them occurred in the Yellow Emperor to the Zhou Dynasty period, the dynasties during this period are often based on the sub-feudal system, to the Qin Shi Huang unified the six kingdoms, after the implementation of the county system, the sub-feudal system withdrew from the main stage of history, the later generations occasionally appeared, but often also short-lived, or only supporting roles, which explains why after the Qin Dynasty, there are few more ancestral fiefs as the source of the surname.
A witness to the Great National Integration
The wheel of history moved forward further, and the Chinese nation came to the Han and Tang Dynasties, at which stage the flame of Chinese civilization began to gradually mature and began to bloom with brilliant light. In order to pro-government, Emperor Wu of han proposed to "depose the Hundred Families of Confucianism" by hanging up sheep's heads and selling dog meat, disguised as an official of Empress Dowager Dou's Huang Lao family, but under the operation of the great Confucian Dong Zhongshu, he contributed to the formation of Confucian culture. Zhang Daoling, who was born in Feng County (in present-day Jiangsu Province), began to preach in Shuzhong after traveling to the four directions, and established the Zhengyi Mengwei Dao, which became one of the beginnings of later Generations of Taoism. The eastern transmission of Buddhism, Xuanzang's sutras, led to the formation of Zen Buddhism in China.
Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, the flame of civilization took shape, naturally attracting people who yearn for the light, so the Han and Tang Dynasties became an era of multi-ethnic integration in Chinese history, and nomadic peoples such as Xiongnu and Xianbei were successively integrated into the big family of Chinese nationalities, which also prompted another major source of Chinese surname culture - ethnic minorities to borrow Chinese characters as clans.
For example, the Xiongnu who are integrated into the Chinese nation have changed their surnames to Liu, Huyan, Haolian, Yuwen, Gao, Wei, etc., and the Xiongnu people have changed their surnames for a long time, so many surnames still retain a lot of nomadic characteristics at the beginning, but later with the deepening of integration, and for the convenience of use, they have been further simplified, such as Hao Lianshi gradually simplified to Hao, He, Lian, Lou, and Wuwei.
Compared with the Xiongnu, under the cultural reform of Emperor Xiaowen of Wei (467-499) from top to bottom, the ethnic integration of the Xianbei clan was more crisp and thorough, and the descendants of the Xianbei imperial tuoba clan (descendants of the Yellow Emperor) changed their surnames to "Yuan", and the descendants of the Xianbei clan changed their surnames to Changsun, Li (see Note 2), Wang, Zheng, Jin, Zhao, etc.
When you see these new members of the hundred family names, you sometimes feel that this is the best proof that the fifty-six ethnic groups in China are united today, because they are already one family in terms of surnames.
And these surnames are also like cultural symbols, witnessing the history of the great integration of the Chinese nation.
Note 1: Successive dynasties and dynasties have had different five surnames due to changes in population and customs, and the five surnames that account for the largest proportion of the population alone are: Li, Wang, Zhang, Liu, and Chen.
Note 2: The "Li surname" in Tuoba's change of surname is the ancestor of the later Li Tang Dynasty, And Li Yuan and Li Shimin all originated from this, so Tang Xuanzong Li Longji revered Lao Tzu as his ancestor and posthumously honored Him as "Emperor Gaoshang Jinque Emperor of the Great Saint Ancestor", which was obviously disrespectful to history (of course, many later emperors also did so).