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How Han heirs became the He family
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INITIALLY, the family name He was an accident — the result of a mispronunciation that was never corrected. But today, the Hes have become one of China’s big family.
With an estimated population of 13 million in China, He ranks 18th on the list of most common surnames in China. About 1.06 percent of the Chinese population are surnamed He.
The earliest branch is derived from the royal family of Ji in Zhou Dynasty (1100 BC-221 BC). A prince of the Zhou Dynasty established the Han Kingdom in the Warring States Period (476-221 BC). The kingdom was conquered by Qin (221-206 BC), and his offspring named themselves Han as a way to commemorate their mother’s kingdom. Some of them fled to today’s Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, where locals struggled to distinguishing the word “Han” from “He”, thus making the Han today’s He. The family left the mistake uncorrected and started using He instead. At the time, marriages between Hes and Hans were not encouraged because they were thought to be too closely related.
Some Hes originated from other groups during the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907).
Another major source of the He family today came from other families who changed their surnames into He for various reasons throughout history. A well-known case is that of the descendants of scholar Fang Xiaoru of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Keeping loyal to the previous emperor, Fang displeased Zhu Di who usurped the throne. Zhu ordered the entire family to be killed. But some of Fang’s descendants, the legend goes, escaped and fled to Lujiang in today’s Anhui Province. They changed their surname to He to go unnoticed. In their family book, however, they left a note saying that all of them would carry the surname He while alive, and Fang once they were dead.
Since the Jin Dynasty (AD 265-420), the Hes started to move southward and became one of the first eight big families of Han nationality who settled in today’s Fujian Province. Notable Hes include He Chengtian, an astronomer and atheistic ideologist in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, He Jingming, also an astronomer and litterateur in the Ming Dynasty and Ho Hung San (Stanley Ho), the Macanese business magnate.
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