I recieved emails from my friends usually, but some friends called me “Mr. Ning”. That’s wrong, my family name is Shang, Ning is my given name.

We Chinese name different from those of personal names in Western cultures.

Most noticeably, a Chinese name is written with the family name first and the given name next. For instance, my name is Shang Ning, Shang is my family name, and Ning is my given name. So, you can call me “Mr. Shang” or “Dear Ning”.

Thus, the family name of Mao Zedong is Mao, and his given name is Zedong. The basketball player who is commonly called Yao Ming, his family name is Yao and his given name is Ming.

The movie star Jackie Chan, his Chinese name is Chan Loong, Chan is his family name, Loong is his given name, Jackie Chan is his English name in Western cultures.

Shang, Mao, Chan, Yao are all Chinese family names. So, how many family names are there in China?

There is a family names’ book in China, its title is “one hundred family names”. In fact, there are over 700 different CHinese family names, but as few as twenty cover a majority of Chinese people.

The great majority of Chinese family names have only one Chinese character, but there are a few with two characteres. Shang, only one Chinese character, is my family name.

Traditional naming schemes often followed a pattern of using generation names as part of a two-character given name; however, this is less used today, many given names use only one character. My given name is just one character, it is Ning :)