Three Surnames: Li, Wang, Zhang Top 270 Million in Population

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, July 30, 2002

Three Surnames: Li, Wang, Zhang Top 270 Million in Population

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After years of study, Yuan Yida, associate research fellow of Institute of Genetics and Development Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences found that China's three largest surnames Li, Wang, Zhang account respectively for 7.9, 7.4 and 7.1 percent of the population. They feature a total number of 270 million, being the three large surnames of the world.

According to Yuan's study, about 87 percent of the Chinese population are surnamed the 100 common surnames. Among them, 19 surnames take up the country's one percent of the population. They are Li, Wang, Zhang, Liu, Chen, Yang, Zhao, Huang, Zhou, Wu, Xu, Sun, Hu, Zhu, Gao, Lin, He, Guo and Ma.

In addition, people with same surnames are not distributed proportionally. In north China, surname Wang is the No.1 family name, accounting for 9.9 percent of the population, and next is Li, Zhang and Liu.

In the south region, Chen ranks the first, accounting for 10.6 percent of total population and the following is Li, Huang, Lin and Zhang.

In the Yangtze River area, the No.1 surname is Li, accounting for 7 percent of the regional population, Wang, Zhang, Chen, Liu come the next respectively.

Yuan drew a genetic map in terms of the 100 common surnames, which indicates the distribution of the same surnames in the country.

Yuan said that with the development of science, surname is not only a kind of culture. It has things to do with the genetic study - a branch for "surname colony genetics". The distribution being Chinese unique culture, it has a great deal to do with the country' origin, gene distribution and trend for population development, land-use and many other problems.

By PD Online Staff Li Yan

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