A character the dictionary defines as a mood
The character is a horse. Everyone knows this, it is true, and it is the least interesting true thing about it.
Open the Shuowen Jiezi, the first systematic Chinese dictionary, finished around 100 CE, and look the word up in scroll ten. The entry does not begin with an animal. It begins with two words, anger and martial force, and only then does it get around to saying that the shape depicts a horse's head, its mane, its tail and its four legs.
This is not Xu Shen being poetic. He is using the standard method of his time, the sound gloss, in which a word is explained by other words that sounded similar to it, on the theory that words that sound alike are related in sense. Modern linguistics does not accept the theory. But the entry is still what it is: the oldest surviving definition of this surname's character tells you what a horse is like before it tells you what a horse is. It is the definition of a temper.
Which, if you have spent any time near a horse, is not obviously wrong.
The character survives in two forms. The traditional 馬 has ten strokes and four short marks along the bottom, usually explained as the legs. The simplified 马 has three strokes and none of them, which makes it one of the fastest surnames in the language to write and, for a beginner with a brush, one of the least forgiving. Three strokes leave nowhere to hide.
The general, the district, and the son who lost an army
The main branch of the surname begins with a specific man, a specific battle and a specific piece of ground, which is unusual: most Chinese surname origins dissolve into legend somewhere around the third sentence.
In 271 BCE the state of Qin, the one that would eventually swallow everybody, attacked the state of Zhao. Zhao sent a commander called Zhao She, who did something that in retrospect looks obvious and at the time apparently was not: he hid the bulk of his army on high ground and attacked in the dark. It worked. Beating Qin in the field was, by that stage of the Warring States period, close to unheard of.
King Huiwen of Zhao rewarded him with a district called Mafu, north of what is now Handan in Hebei. His descendants took the first character of the district's name as their surname, and that character is this one. The name of a horse-related patch of Hebei became one of the largest families in China.
There is a second half to the story, and almost nobody tells the two together.
Zhao She had a son, Zhao Kuo. The boy was famously brilliant on military theory, could out-argue his father on strategy, and was given command of the Zhao army at Changping after his father's death. What followed was the worst military catastrophe in Chinese antiquity. Chinese has an idiom for exactly this kind of person: zhǐ shàng tán bīng, discussing warfare on paper, said of anyone whose plan is flawless until it meets weather. It attaches to Zhao Kuo.
So the founding household of this surname produced, in two generations, the man who beat Qin against the odds and the man whose name became shorthand for confident incompetence. There is probably a lesson in there about inherited talent, and Chinese has been declining to draw it for two thousand years.
Wrapped in a horse's hide
The best-known sentence anyone surnamed Ma ever said contains the character twice, once as his name and once as a horse.
Ma Yuan was a general under the Eastern Han, a veteran of campaigns in the far south and the northern frontier, and by the time of the remark he was over sixty and expected to retire. The Book of the Later Han records what he said instead. The Xiongnu and the Wuhuan were still troubling the northern border, he wanted to go and fight them, and a man ought to die out in the wild country of the frontier and come home wrapped in a horse's hide for burial. How, he asked, could a man lie down on a bed and die in the hands of women and children?
The four characters at the center of that, mǎ gé guǒ shī, are still in the language. They mean to die in service, far away, without ceremony, and they are among the most quoted military phrases in Chinese. Ma Yuan got the death he asked for, on campaign in Hunan, and then had his posthumous honors stripped by a court that had turned against him, which is the usual ending for this kind of person.
The surname Chinese Islam chose
This is the part that makes the name unlike any other on this site.
Islam has been in China since the Tang dynasty, and Chinese Muslims, over centuries, needed Chinese names. Hui, Salar, Bonan and Dongxiang families commonly settled on this character as the Chinese rendering of Mahmud, or of Muhammad. The logic is phonetic rather than symbolic. In older Chinese transcriptions of the Prophet's name the first syllable comes out close to ma, and this character, already an extremely common surname, was there to take it.
The result is that in Chinese Muslim communities, from Ningxia to Yunnan to Gansu, this surname is everywhere, and it usually means something quite different from what it means in Henan.
The best illustration is a man who is not called Ma. Zheng He, the admiral who took Ming treasure fleets across the Indian Ocean to Hormuz and the coast of Africa in the early fifteenth century, was born in 1371 as Ma He, to a Hui family in Kunyang in Yunnan. He was a great-great-great-grandson of Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din Omar, a Bukharan administrator who governed Yunnan under the Mongols. He became Zheng He only in 1404, when the Yongle Emperor conferred the surname Zheng on him, on the eleventh of February, as a reward for defending a reservoir during the civil war that put that emperor on the throne.
So the most famous navigator in Chinese history was born with this surname and had it replaced, by an emperor, as a compliment. Both facts are worth knowing, and English accounts of him tend to mention the first in a subordinate clause and skip what it signified.
The other Mas, including the one with a period
Two of the four questions people put into search engines about this name are about whether it is Korean or Filipino, so here they are, answered.
Korean: yes, genuinely. The character is read Ma in Korean and exists as a Korean surname, written in hangul as a single syllable. It is rare. Korea's surname distribution is famously top-heavy, with Kim, Lee and Park accounting for a huge share of the population, and Ma is nowhere near that. If you encounter the name and have to bet, bet Chinese.
Filipino: no, and this one is a genuine trap rather than a coincidence. In the Philippines, Ma. with a full stop is a standard written abbreviation of the given name María, used by women whose first name is María plus something else. Ma. Cristina, Ma. Victoria, Ma. Theresa. It is Spanish, it honors the Virgin Mary, and it belongs in the first-name column, not the surname column. The reason so many people ask is that in an alphabetized list, with the period easily lost, a Filipino Ma. and a Chinese Ma look like the same thing on paper.
Vietnamese Mã is this character too, and rare.
Horses everywhere
Two of the largest technology companies on earth were founded by men with this surname: Jack Ma at Alibaba and Ma Huateng at Tencent, unrelated to each other and, between them, responsible for a good deal of how a billion people shop and talk. Ma Ying-jeou was president of Taiwan. The name turns up so often in Chinese public life that it has stopped being remarkable, which is what happens at seventeen million people.
And the character has a second life on this site, because the horse is also one of the twelve animals of the zodiac, written with exactly this glyph. If you were born in a horse year, the zodiac horse page is about the same character you may be signing your emails with.
If you want to know what your own name would look like built the Chinese way, from sound and meaning at the same time, our name builder will put one together.
Three strokes, seventeen million people, a definition that means anger, and a period that changes everything.
