However, it is not difficult to roughly estimate the number of surnames in China. For example, the pre-Qin surname book, with 875 as the surname, earned 18. Although some surnames have not been handed down, most of them are still in use today. Another example is the Han Dynasty surname book "Collection of Nine Articles", which contains 130 surnames, of which 127 are single surnames and 3 are compound surnames. Because this book is a children's literacy textbook written according to the rhythm, it is undeniable that its author avoids some surnames that are difficult to write, read and rhyme. So this 130 surname is not all the surnames used by Han people.
After the Han Dynasty, the number of surnames used in China has been increasing, and some new surnames and surnames changed by ethnic minorities have emerged in large numbers, greatly enriching the number of surnames in China. There are 293 surnames in Tang Genealogy in the early Tang Dynasty, and 1233 surnames in Yuanhe Surnames Compilation in the middle Tang Dynasty. Song people wrote Tongzhi Genealogy and Surnames Explanation, which included 2 155 and 2,568 surnames respectively. In addition, the book Xiong's written by Amin Chen Shiyuan contains 3625 surnames; The General Examination of Continuing Literature compiled by Wang Qi contains 4,657 surnames, while The Complete Collection of Surnames in China compiled by modern people contains more than 5,600 surnames, The Complete Collection of Surnames in China contains 5,730 surnames, The Symbol of Surnames in China contains 6,363 surnames, Surnames Dictionary contains more than 8,000 surnames, and the income of China Surnames Dictionary is1. The Dictionary of China Surnames Calligraphy compiled by Chen Lifu, a consultant of our company and a famous expert on surnames culture, has a total of1kloc-0/29 surnames, and 993 1 surnames have been added, bringing the total number of surnames to 20060. These books specializing in surnames have a certain influence. From the fact that more and more surnames are collected, it is not difficult to see that Chinese surnames are constantly developing and changing.
Because surnames themselves are constantly developing and changing, it is impossible and impossible for any kind of surname book to include all surnames in China without omission. According to experts' estimation, there are more than 20,000 surnames actually used in China.