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Ancestral home | |||||||||||||||||
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Traditional Chinese | 籍貫 | ||||||||||||||||
Simplified Chinese | 籍贯 | ||||||||||||||||
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Alternative Chinese name | |||||||||||||||||
Chinese | 祖籍 | ||||||||||||||||
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Second alternative Chinese name | |||||||||||||||||
Chinese | 老家 | ||||||||||||||||
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In Chinese culture,an ancestral home is the place of origin of one's extended family. It may or may not be the place where one is born. For instance,Lien Chan was born in Xi'an,but his ancestral home is Zhangzhou.
A subjective concept,a person's ancestral home could be the birthplace of any of their patriline ancestors. Su Shi limited it to five generations,i.e. it refers to the home of one's great-great-grandfather. Even more broadly,an ancestral home can refer to the first locality where a surname came to be established or prominent. Commonly,a person usually defines their hometown as what their father considers to be his ancestral home. In practice,most people would define their ancestral homes as the birthplace of their patriline ancestors from the early 20th century,around the time when government authorities began to collect such information from individuals.
Moreover,a person's ancestral home can be defined in any level of locality,from province and county down to town and village,depending on how much an individual knows about their ancestry.
The Chinese emphasis on a person's ancestral home is a legacy of its history as an agrarian society,where a family would often be tied to its land for generations. In Chinese culture,the importance of family and regional identity are such that a person's ancestral home or birthplace plays an important social role in personal identity. For instance,at a university,students who hail from the same region will often become members of the regional/hometown society or club for other people with the same background. Discussion of personal or ancestral origins is typical when two people meet for the first time. In recent years,the root-seeking (尋根xúngēn) movement has led to greater interest in ancestral hometowns,especially among overseas Chinese.
Ancestral lineages are an important part of Chinese business culture as it plays a central part of negotiating guanxi . It can also have implications in other areas like politics. See:Shanghainese people in Hong Kong for an example of how ancestry and lineage systems play a part in business practices.
Ancestral home is an item to be filled in many documents in the People's Republic of China ,as well as in pre-1997 Hong Kong.[ citation needed ] Forms that required listing of "ancestral home" (籍貫) included school handbooks to be signed by the parents of schoolchildren. [1] [ better source needed ]
National ID cards issued in Taiwan by the Republic of China government formerly carried an entry for "home citizenship" (本籍). Citizens would usually have their ancestral home (defined through the patriline) stated on these documents,despite having never set foot in their ancestral home. This practice was abolished by the government in the mid-1990s amid the Taiwan localization movement.
Birth Certificates of Singapore issued by the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority carried the entries for "dialect group" (labeled as 籍贯 in Chinese) for newborn's parents. [2]
Chinese surnames are used by Han Chinese and Sinicized ethnic groups in Greater China, Korea, Vietnam and among overseas Chinese communities around the world such as Singapore and Malaysia. Written Chinese names begin with surnames, unlike the Western tradition in which surnames are written last. Around 2,000 Han Chinese surnames are currently in use, but the great proportion of Han Chinese people use only a relatively small number of these surnames; 19 surnames are used by around half of the Han Chinese people, while 100 surnames are used by around 87% of the population. A report in 2019 gives the most common Chinese surnames as Wang and Li, each shared by over 100 million people in China. The remaining eight of the top ten most common Chinese surnames are Zhang, Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang, Zhao, Wu and Zhou.
The Hakka, sometimes also referred to as Hakka-speaking Chinese, or Hakka Chinese, or Hakkas, are a southern Han Chinese subgroup whose principal settlements and ancestral homes are dispersed widely across the provinces of southern China and who speak a language that is closely related to Gan, a Han Chinese dialect spoken in Jiangxi province. They are differentiated from other southern Han Chinese by their dispersed nature and tendency to occupy marginal lands and remote hilly areas. The Chinese characters for Hakka literally mean "guest families".
Chinese names are personal names used by individuals from Greater China and other parts of the Sinophone world. Sometimes the same set of Chinese characters could be chosen as a Chinese name, a Hong Kong name, a Japanese name, a Korean name, a Malaysian Chinese name, or a Vietnamese name, but they would be spelled differently due to their varying historical pronunciation of Chinese characters.
The Macanese people are a multiracial East Asian ethnic group that originated in Macau in the 16th century, consisting of people of predominantly mixed Cantonese and Portuguese as well as Malay, Japanese, English, Dutch, Sinhalese, and Indian ancestry.
A Chinese kin, lineage or sometimes rendered as clan, is a patrilineal and patrilocal group of related Chinese people with a common surname sharing a common ancestor and, in many cases, an ancestral home.
Chinese folk religion comprises a range of traditional religious practices of Han Chinese, including the Chinese diaspora. This includes the veneration of shen ('spirits') and ancestors, and worship devoted to deities and immortals, who can be deities of places or natural phenomena, of human behaviour, or progenitors of family lineages. Stories surrounding these gods form a loose canon of Chinese mythology. By the Song dynasty (960–1279), these practices had been blended with Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist teachings to form the popular religious system which has lasted in many ways until the present day. The government of China generally tolerates popular religious organizations, but has suppressed or persecuted those that they fear would undermine social stability.
"Guo", written in Chinese: 郭, is one of the most common Chinese surnames and means "the wall that surrounds a city" in Chinese. It can also be transliterated as Cok, Gou, Quo, Quach, Quek, Que, Keh, Kuo, Kwo, Kuoch, Kok, Koc, Kwee, Kwek, Kwik, Kwok, Kuok, Kuek, Gock, Koay, or Ker. The Korean equivalent is spelled Kwak; the Vietnamese equivalent is Quách.
The Han Chinese people can be defined into subgroups based on linguistic, cultural, ethnic, genetic, and regional features. The terminology used in Mandarin to describe the groups is: "minxi", used in mainland China or "zuqun", used in Taiwan. No Han subgroup is recognized as one of People's Republic of China's 56 official ethnic groups, in Taiwan only three subgroups, Hoklo, Hakka and Waishengren are recognized.
Chinese Australians are Australians of Chinese origin. Chinese Australians are one of the largest groups within the global Chinese diaspora, and are the largest Asian Australian community. Per capita, Australia has more people of Chinese ancestry than any country outside Asia. As a whole, Australian residents identifying themselves as having Chinese ancestry made up 5.5% of Australia's population at the 2021 census.
Ding is a Chinese family name. It consists of only 2 strokes. The only two characters that have fewer strokes are "一" and "乙".
Shanghainese people in Hong Kong have played an important role in the region, despite being a relatively small portion of the Han Chinese population. "Shanghainese" is a term that refers to both the Wu Chinese language and the Han Chinese subgroups from the city of Shanghai and the peoples of the Jiangnan region in Hong Kong more broadly, particularly those with ancestral homes in parts of southern Jiangsu (Kiangsu), northern Zhejiang (Chekiang) and Anhui provinces.
Waishengren (WSR), sometimes called mainlanders, are a group of migrants who arrived in Taiwan from mainland China between the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II in 1945, and Kuomintang retreat and the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. They came from various regions of mainland China and spanned multiple social classes.
Shanghainese people are an ethnic group of Shanghai Hukou descent or people who have ancestral roots from Shanghai. Most Shanghainese are descended from immigrants from nearby provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu. According to 1990 census, 85% of Shanghainese people trace their ancestry to Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Only a minority are Shanghai natives, those with ancestral roots in Shanghai.
De-Sinicization is a process of eliminating or reducing Han Chinese cultural elements, identity, or consciousness from a society or nation. In modern contexts, it is often contrasted with the assimilation process of Sinicization.
A spirit tablet, memorial tablet, or ancestral tablet is a placard that people used to designate the seat of a deity or past ancestor as well as to enclose it. The name of the deity or the past ancestor is usually inscribed onto the tablet. With origins in traditional Chinese culture, the spirit tablet is a common sight in many East Asian countries, where forms of ancestor veneration are practiced. Spirit tablets are traditional ritual objects commonly seen in temples, shrines, and household altars throughout Mainland China and Taiwan.
Chinese ancestor veneration, also called Chinese ancestor worship, is an aspect of the Chinese traditional religion which revolves around the ritual celebration of the deified ancestors and tutelary deities of people with the same surname organised into lineage societies in ancestral shrines. Ancestors, their ghosts, or spirits, and gods are considered part of "this world". They are neither supernatural nor transcendent in the sense of being beyond nature. The ancestors are humans who have become godly beings, beings who keep their individual identities. For this reason, Chinese religion is founded on veneration of ancestors. Ancestors are believed to be a means of connection to the supreme power of Tian as they are considered embodiments or reproducers of the creative order of Heaven. It is a major aspect of Han Chinese religion, but the custom has also spread to ethnic minority groups.
Hongkongers, Hong Kongers, Hong Kongese, Hongkongese, Hong Kong citizens and Hong Kong people are demonyms that refer to a resident of Hong Kong, although they may also refer to others who were born and/or raised in the territory.
Taishanese people, Sze Yup people, or Toisanese are a Yue-speaking Han Chinese group coming from Sze Yup, which consisted of the four county-level cities of Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui and Enping. Heshan has since been added to this historic region and the prefecture-level city of Jiangmen administers all five of these county-level cities, which are sometimes informally called Ng Yap. The ancestors of Taishanese people are said to have arrived from central China under a thousand years ago and migrated into Guangdong during the Tang Dynasty. Taishanese, as a dialect of Yue Chinese, has linguistically preserved many characteristics of Middle Chinese.
An ancestral shrine, hall or temple, also called lineage temple, is a temple dedicated to deified ancestors and progenitors of surname lineages or families in the Chinese tradition. Ancestral temples are closely linked to Confucian philosophy and culture and the emphasis that it places on filial piety.
Cen is the Mandarin pinyin romanization of the Chinese surname written 岑 in Chinese character. It is romanized Ts'en in Wade–Giles, and variously as Sam, Sum, Sham, Shum in Cantonese, Gim, Khim, Chim in Taiwanese Hokkien and Chen in other pinyin forms. Cen is listed 67th in the Song dynasty classic text Hundred Family Surnames. As of 2008, it is the 235th most common surname in China, shared by 340,000 people. Cen is considered a rare surname. A person with a rare surname like Cen may be able to trace his or her origins to a single ancestral area.