I published 109 Chinese surnames as open data — here are the awkward parts
Every few months someone asks me for a "list of Chinese surnames". The answer is always more annoying than it should be. The lists that exist fall into three camps. The classic Hundred Family Surnames ordering — 赵钱孙李 — is a Song dynasty poem, not a frequency table, so sorting by it means nothing. Scraped CSVs have thousands of rows, no tone marks, and 欧阳 split into two separate characters…
In an effort to standardize Chinese surname data, an individual has released a dataset containing 109 surnames, along with 13 fields of information for each record. The data is available in both JSON and CSV formats, both licensed under CC BY 4.0, allowing for free use, modification, and redistribution with proper attribution. The dataset includes information such as the surname, pinyin, era, ancestor, origin, notable figures, commandery and hall names, and a rank.
The dataset also addresses issues such as compound surnames, empty values indicating unknown data, and arrays in the CSV format.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
