Throughout Chinese history, name changes have carried a lot of meaning
- Despite being named Xu Shiji at birth, the Tang-dynasty military commander is better known as Li Ji
- Considering the circumstances that led to his many name changes offers some insight into the practice
A friend of mine recently changed her name in the hope of securing a better future for herself and her family. After consulting Chinese name experts, she now has a new name, which her friends are still getting used to.
Name changes occur all the time. What was once called the Wuhan pneumonia became Covid-19; Taiwan’s China Airlines wants another name that would cause less confusion among foreigners. Many Western women still take their husband’s surname when they marry, despite the inconvenience and bureaucratic nightmare. Even nations have changed their names.
Traditionally, the Chinese were very protective of their given names and surnames were especially sacrosanct. Only under certain circumstances would people change their names. To understand them, let’s consider the name changes of Li Ji (594-669), a military commander who helped found the Tang dynasty (618-907).
Li Ji was born Xu Shiji. His surname change came about when a grateful Li Yuan, the founding emperor of the Tang dynasty, conferred on him the privilege of bearing the “imperial surname”, Li. So, Xu Shiji became Li Shiji. This was one of the ways that Chinese rulers secured the loyalty of their subjects.
The famous Ming dynasty loyalist Zheng Chenggong (1624–1662) was known in the West as Koxinga, a corruption of the Chinese title Guoxingye, or “Lord of the Imperial Surname”. He was allowed to bear the surname Zhu, the family name of the Ming imperial family, in return for his support of the doomed Southern Ming regime against the Manchu conquerors.
Besides their own ministers or generals, Chinese emperors also bestowed imperial surnames on non-Chinese rulers of tributary states in the nation’s peripheries as a form of appeasement.
When Li Shimin became emperor, countless people in China had to change their names if theirs contained the characters “shi” or “min”. However, there was a certain arbitrariness in the application of the name taboo.
Sometimes, characters that merely sounded similar to the emperor’s name had to be changed as well. The taboo could also be applied retroactively, where the names of long-dead persons were changed in contemporaneous records because they clashed with the personal name of the ruler of the day.
It wasn’t only confined to people’s names. Geographic names and even names of gods had to defer to the mortal emperor. The original Chinese name, translated from Sanskrit, of the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy was Guanshiyin, or “the One who Perceives the World’s Lamentations”. However, as the character “shi” (“world”) featured in the emperor’s given name, it was removed and the goddess became Guanyin, as she is still known today.
Heng’e, the immortal who flew to the moon, shared the same character in her name with Liu Heng, Emperor Wen of the Western Han. So, her name was changed to Chang’e, which has been used in China’s lunar exploration programme.
