Yuan Yida, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said he discovered that Li, the largest surname in the country, makes up 7.9 percent of China's 1.3 billion population.

Wang makes up 7.4 percent, and Zhang 7.1 percent.

Compared with Europeans and even other Asian countries, China has a much longer surname history dating back nearly 5,000 years. And the country boasts more than 22,000 surnames, including those used by ethnic minorities in ancient and modern times.

Yuan said 87 percent of the country' population, or 1.1 billion people, share only 100 surnames.

Each surname in the top 19 claims at least 13 million users, according to Yuan.

After Li, Wang and Zhang comes these surnames: Liu, Chen, Yang, Zhao, Huang, Zhou, Wu, Xu, Sun, Hu, Zhu, Gao, Lin, He, Guo and Ma.

Yuan said these 19 surnames have made up half of the country's population throughout China's history.

Yuan based his decade-long research of China's family names on the third national census.

Yuan's research also shows that the geographical distribution of Chinese surname groupings is not balanced among different regions.

Generally speaking, the surname of Wang is most common in northern China, making up 9.9 percent of the population there.

But in southern China, Chen reigns as the most frequent surname, comprising 10.6 percent of the region's population.

Yuan said that in each of China's provinces, one or two surnames occur more frequently than in other provinces, such as Liang and Luo in Guangdong Province, Zheng in Fujian Province, Gao in Gansu Province, Pan in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and He in Sichuan Province.

"The distribution of Chinese surnames can provide critical hints for a host of hereditary characteristics, the origins of the Chinese nation," Yuan said.

(China Daily July 30, 2002)