The book "Hundred Family Names" is said to have been compiled by an old Confucian in the Qiantang area of Wuyue during the Northern Song Dynasty.
According to the common surname, the book uses four characters as a sentence and two sentences as a rhyme, which is catchy to read, easy to learn and easy to remember, resulting in wide circulation and influence to this day.
The two books "Hundred Family Names" and "Three Character Classic" and "Thousand Character Text" are collectively called "Three Hundred Thousand", which are the enlightenment books of children in ancient mainland China. There are other reasons for the order of surnames in the Book of Hundred Family Names according to Zhao Qiansun Li, not according to the number of people with each surname at that time, but by the influence of the political situation at that time.
According to the research of Wang Mingqing of the Song Dynasty, the reason why the surname of the hundred families should rank the Zhao surname first is because the emperor of the Song Dynasty at that time was Zhao Kuangyin, and the Zhao surname was the national surname. So it's okay to put it first.
However, at the time of the founding of the Song Dynasty, there were other major regimes. There were also kings in the Zhejiang region, one was Qian Yu of wu yueguo, and the other was Li Yu, the southern Tang dynasty lord of Jinling. Therefore, the surname of Qian Li was also arranged in front.
According to legend, the scholar who wrote the surname of the hundred families was a Qiantang person, and there was a kind of partial intention of his own people, so he ranked the surname of concubine Sun of The King of Wuyue qianwei before the surname of Li, and the final version of the surname of the hundred families formed the order of Zhao Qiansun Li.
The later King Zheng of Zhou Wu was also the surname of Qian Wei's concubine, but it was not a concubine. Most of the other surnames in the order of the next line were influenced by the political situation at that time.
In ancient times, especially after the Wei and Jin Dynasties, people attached great importance to surnames, and surnames often represented a family status, which was an important business card.
In the Tang Dynasty, the order of surnames was also arranged according to the influence of political position, and at that time, eight famous surnames were discharged, and several people intermarried with each other for generations, and the influence was not small.
At that time, when the courtiers compiled the clan system, they had excluded the surnames of Cui, Lu, Li, and Zheng in the front according to the order of the old clans, which made Tang Taizong Li Shimin very unhappy after reading it, and how to put the Li surname behind. The courtiers had to rearrange them in the new order, and natural reason was placed first. The Thousand Family Names compiled by the Ming Dynasty also ranked the Zhu surname first.
Hundreds of families, do you think there are only 100 surnames? In fact, "Hundred Family Names" is not only 100 surnames, hundreds is just a category, in different dynasties, the number of surnames in different periods is also different, there are increases and decreases.
At first, the "Hundred Family Names" recorded 411 surnames, but by the Yuan Dynasty, due to years of war, the versions that could be preserved were already incomplete, so the number of surnames recorded above was naturally missing.
In the Ming Dynasty, some additions were made to the version of the Yuan Dynasty, a total of 438 surnames were recorded, of which 408 were single surnames and 30 compound surnames, and in the Qing Dynasty, they increased to 504 surnames, of which 444 were single surnames and 60 were compound surnames.