Where do I come from? — A family name is a road walked for thousands of years.
For the Chinese, a surname is a genealogy carried on one's back. It records a fief granted, a migration made, a voyage to the South Seas; it records the three characters a family still wrote above the ancestral hall door in a new land — the commandery, the hall name, the ancestral home.
This archive follows the March 2026 household-registration statistics of the Ministry of Public Security and covers the forty largest surnames. For each: origins, migration, commandery seats, hall names and family precepts — with key Nanyang (Southeast Asian) Chinese surnames flagged, offering overseas Chinese a thread to follow home.
※ Most surnames have many lines of origin — we present the most widespread mainstream account, and genealogical records should remain the final authority.