2010-4-13
By Wang Xiang
DID you know there are people with Kill, Death, and Ghost as their family names? A retired man in Jiangxi Province said he will apply for entry in the Guinness World Records for collecting more than 2,000 of the weirdest surnames in China.
The 75-year-old Cheng Yinglian said his interest in collecting these unusual family names was piqued 20 years ago when he read a byline in a newspaper that started with Gui, meaning Ghost in Chinese, reported the Jiang Nan City Daily.
Cheng said he found that weird surnames had stories behind them and he started to pay special attention to them.
Soon he became obsessed. He told the newspaper he has spent almost every spare second in the past 20 years seeking them out, eventually publishing book, "Thousands of Surnames."
There were surnames meaning numbers (from zero to zillion), daily necessities (tea, oil, salt, and vinegar), and time units (seconds, minute, hour). Other unfortunate folks have inherited surnames such as Yao, meaning drugs, Zai, meaning kill, Si, meaning death.
It was not easy to compile the list, as most Chinese people share a few common surnames, like Zhang, Wang, Li, Liu and Chen.
There were about 92.9 million Chinese people, 7.25 percent of the country's total population, with the surname Wang, meaning King, as data showed in 2008.
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