As of June 30, 2018, Taiwan had just 22,332 people with a disyllabic surname (i.e., one that takes two Chinese characters to write). They cover just 0.09% of the population — just less than one in a thousand. This is slightly less than the 0.11 percent of the population of China that has such a family name. Also, in China, by far the most common two-syllable surname is Ouyang; but in Taiwan “Zhangjian” is more seen.
| Name | Name | total |
| 張簡 | Zhangjian | 9,059 |
| 歐陽 | Ouyang | 7,860 |
| 范姜 | Fanjiang | 4,300 |
| 周黃 | Zhouhuang | 590 |
| 江謝 | Jiangxie | 523 |
Further reading:
- Two-syllable Chinese family names, Pinyin News, May 15, 2013
- older figures, but with other useful information: 85 percent of Han in China have two-syllable given names: report, Pinyin News, August 10, 2008
Source:
- Quánguó xìngmíng tǒngjì fēnxi (全國姓名統計分析). Department of Household Registration, Ministry of the Interior, Taiwan, 2018, p. 28.
Hi, I’m from Taiwan.
“Zhangjian” is “張簡”, and “Fanjiang” is “范姜”.
My wife has “Zhangliao 張廖” which has mediocre members among people with two-syllable family names.
For the original post, I used ChatGPT to remove Microsoft Word’s crap code from the HTML table. But the AI bot hallucinated and gave me some simplified characters. I’ve fixed this — I hope.
Thanks, Aiuanyu. I’ve fixed those.
I had them correct originally. But ChatGPT had its own “ideas” and changed them.
I see I’m going to have to be much more careful about employing AI bots for even simple tasks.