Read the following text and answer the quiz below.
[1] Most Chinese people have one-character surnames. Some people have two-character surnames. These are special and uncommon. You might know some Chinese stars with longer surnames, like Ouyang Nana. She is an actress and a cellist from Taiwan. Another example is Jimmy O. Yang, a comedian and actor from Hong Kong.
[2] These two celebrities have the same last name, Ouyang. It is the most common family name with two parts in China, used by more than 1.1 million people. This information comes from the 2020 National Name Report by the Ministry of Public Security.
[3] China has fewer than 100 compound family names. The second most common one is Shangguan, which about 88,000 people have. Then, the next most popular compound family names are Huangfu, followed by Linghu, Zhuge, Situ and Sima. Today, only a few million people have these compound surnames, but in ancient times, there were over 1,000 of them.
[4] Compound surnames come from different sources. Some started as old official titles. Some were based on jobs. Others are names from specific areas, such as Ouyang and Dongguo. Some surnames were taken from names of minority tribes. In some cases, they were changed to single-character surnames. For example, people with the surname Ou or Yang are thought to be related to the Ouyang family. Many surnames just disappeared because Chinese people usually get their family names from their fathers.
[5] The surname Xushi has only one person left in the family today. It was made by a prince from Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, who went to China in the 15th century. He could not go back home because of a coup in Ceylon. So, he stayed in Quanzhou, in southeastern China, and changed the first part of his name to the Chinese surname Shi.
[6] His children kept this name. Then, one of his descendants was a woman who only had daughters. She mixed her surname with her husband’s surname, Xu, and created the new name Xushi. For many years, her family kept their story a secret. In the 1990s, people found their family graveyard called Shijiakeng, which means “pit of Shi family”, in Quanzhou. The last person in the family, Xushi Yin’e, said she was a princess from Ceylon. She is known to be the last person using the surname Xushi.
Source: South China Morning Post, April 4
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