Thie Cave

Following Scott Yang’s footstep, I visited the web page that searches for origin of Chinese surname. Here is the outcome.

Apparently, the surname `Chen’ is also equivalent to `Chang’, `Tan’, and `Tran’ (Vietnamese). It is the 5th most common surname in China. (Yessss, I beat Scott by one rank )

Here is the history, quoted from http://www.yutopian.com/names/

Yao Di asked two of his daughters to marry Shun and let him stayed in Wei Na He. Later Yao even gave the throne to Shun. Shun’s descendents in Wei Na He are known as the Wei family. After Zhou Wu Wang brought an end to the Xia Dynasty, he looked for royal descendents of previous dynasties. He found Wei Man, awarded him the duke of Chen (in Wei Yang of He Nan Province), and allowed him to marry one of his daughters, Yuan Ji. Wei Man was then known as Chen Wu Gong, and was the forefather of the Chen family. Another tribe came from the Bei Wei Dynasty, when the Mo’s changed their names to Chen. Yet another tribe was named after the king of Vietnam whose last name was Chen. (Chen means old).
Hometown: Zhang Ge of HeNan Province.

I wonder what it means by `old’. Would that implies acquiring wisdom as one ages? or would that mean `that’s it, you’re expired’?
So many possibilities and following implications.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 4th, 2003 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.