Wāng


Wāng is a Chinese surname. It was 104th of the Hundred Family Surnames poem, contained in the verse Yáo, Shào, Zhàn, Wāng. In 2013, the Fuxi Cultural Association found the name to be the 60th most common in China, being shared by around 4.83 million people or 0.360% of the population, with the province with the largest population being Anhui. A study of the 2020 census found it to be the 59th most common surname in mainland China.
It is also Wong in Cantonese, Ong or Ang in Hokkien, Waung or Vong in American English, and Ō or Oh in Japanese. However, in Vietnamese, it is written Uông.
Wāng was listed by a 2007 NCIIS survey as the 58th most common surname in mainland China and by Yang Xuxian as the 76th most common surname in Taiwan.

Origins of Wāng

汪 means "vast" in the Chinese language, and is often used to describe oceans. In the modern vernacular Chinese, it is also the onomatopoeia for the sound of a barking dog. Baxter and Sagart reconstructed it as *qʷˤaŋ and 'wang, respectively.
  1. It was originally a shortening of Wang Mang, or Wang Wang, name of a state in present-day Deqing County, Zhejiang. After it was conquered by a neighboring state, its inhabitants fled and the surname was shortened to Wang.
  2. The name is derived from the ancestral surname Jiang (姜).

Chinese Muslims

Unlike other Hui people who claim foreign descent, Hui in Gansu with the surname Wāng are descended from Han Chinese who converted to Islam and married Hui or Dongxiang people.
A town called Tangwangchuan in Gansu had a multi-ethnic populace, the Tang and Wāng families predominating. The Tang and Wang families were originally of non-Muslim Han extraction, but by the Twentieth Century some branches of the families had become Muslim by intermarriage or conversion.

Notable people