# Li Surname: Meaning, Origin, and Why Lee, Li, and Rhee Are One Name

> The surname Li (李) means plum, but the name did not come from the tree. Its origin, its poets and emperors, and how it became Lee in three countries at once.

Canonical: https://jadealmanac.com/chinese-surnames/li  
Author: Julian (祝君瑜), Jade Almanac · https://jadealmanac.com/about  
Method and sourcing: https://jadealmanac.com/sources

Li (李, pronounced lǐ, like "lee") is the second most common surname in mainland China by
the official count, around 92 million people, within a rounding error of first. Add the
Koreans who write the same character as Yi or Lee, about one Korean in seven, and the
Vietnamese who write it Lý, and the character comfortably clears 100 million bearers: by
character rather than by country, very possibly the biggest family name on Earth.

It is also the rare giant surname that means something you can hold: a plum. Chen is a
vanished kingdom and Wang a lost rank, but 李 is genuinely the word for the plum tree.
Which makes it all the better that, according to the traditional account, the name did
not come from the tree either.

## Spellings heading

One name, five spellings, three countries

Li's spelling map has a wrinkle none of the other big surnames share: its most common
overseas spelling, Lee, is also a perfectly ordinary English surname. The full map, per
the pattern the [Chinese last names hub](/chinese-surnames) lays out:

## A job title in a plum tree's clothing

The traditional account, preserved in the genealogies, runs like this. Under the legendary
Xia dynasty, the upright judge Gao Yao held the office of Minister of Justice, and his
descendants took the office's character, 理 (lǐ, "to order, to judge"), as their family
name. Generations later the name shifted to a different character with exactly the same
sound: 李, the plum. Same syllable, new tree. Take the Xia-era details as legend rather
than court record, the way the genealogists themselves half did; the pattern is the
believable part, because it is the standard pattern. Even the surname that looks most like
a simple noun turns out to be an office wearing an orchard as a disguise.

The first bearer historians will actually stand behind is worth the wait: Li Er, better
known as Laozi, "the Old Master," the philosopher credited with the *Daodejing* and the
founding of Daoism. The Tang emperors, who shared the surname, took the connection
seriously enough to claim him as an ancestor. Having the author of the most translated
Chinese book in history as your name's first verified entry is the genealogical equivalent
of opening a scrapbook to page one and finding a signed first edition.

The plum does earn its keep in daily speech, twice over. First, in the way Lis introduce
themselves: because so many surnames share a sound, Chinese has a spoken spelling code,
and Li's is the most famous line of it. Say *mù zǐ Lǐ*, "wood-child Li," and you have
named the character's two components and settled which Li you are; the formula opens the
Surname Song, the rhyme in China's first-grade textbooks that teaches children to spell
the great names by their parts. And second, in one of the language's warmest metaphors: a
teacher's students are called *táolǐ*, "peaches and plums," things that take years of
tending and then bear sweet fruit, so a life of teaching well is *táolǐ mǎn tiānxià*,
"peaches and plums filling all under heaven." A hundred million Lis, and the word inside
their name quietly stands for every student anyone ever taught.

## Six lives of the name

One hundred million people generate a deep bench. Six bearers, from a golden age to a
Hong Kong film set.

### The dynasty that made it enormous

In 618, Li Yuan founded the Tang dynasty, and for nearly three centuries the surname sat on
the throne of China's golden age. The Tang emperors treated the name as a decoration: they
bestowed it on favored generals, allies, and chieftains the way later states pinned on
medals, and every bestowal founded a new line of Lis. A dynasty that ruled that long, gave
the name away that freely, and presided over that much prosperity is a large part of why
the name now runs to nine figures. Chen grew by migration and Wang by converging refugees;
Li grew by imperial generosity.

### The poet who drank with the moon

The name's most luminous bearer is Li Bai (701-762), who stands beside Du Fu at the summit
of Chinese poetry. About a thousand of his poems survive, a striking share of them about
wine; as his Wikipedia article puts it, others may have drunk more, but no one has written
more poems about it. His most famous piece pours a cup for the moon and his own shadow to
make a drinking party of three. The legend of his death, told as legend even by its
tellers: drunk in a boat, he leaned out to embrace the moon's reflection in the river and
drowned. Historians prefer illness. The name keeps the better story on file.

### The poet who lost everything except the poems

The finest woman writer in Chinese literary history was a Li: Li Qingzhao (1084-1155),
master of the *ci*, the song-form lyric built for private feeling. Her life splits cleanly
in half. In the first half she and her husband Zhao Mingcheng spent a happy scholarly
marriage collecting books, bronzes, and rubbings, and her lyrics have the shine of someone
writing from inside a charmed life. Then the Jin armies took the Northern Song capital in
1127; the couple fled south, the collection scattered, her husband died two years later,
and she spent her remaining decades in Hangzhou writing some of the most piercing lines of
loss in the language. About a hundred poems survive. It is China's canonical demonstration
that a voice can outlast everything it loved.

### The Lees who ruled Korea for five centuries

In 1392, the general Yi Seong-gye overthrew the Goryeo kingdom and founded the Joseon
dynasty. His family name, Yi (이), is the Korean reading of 李, and his house ruled Korea
for over five hundred years, one of the longest royal runs anywhere on record, ending only
with Japan's annexation in 1910. There is a crossing of stories here: the dynasty the Yis
overthrew was ruled by the Wangs, whose survivors, as told on
[our Wang page](/chinese-surnames/wang), hid from persecution inside other characters. One
giant surname chased another off a throne. Even South Korea's first president, Syngman
Rhee, was a descendant of the royal house: same character, older spelling.

### The Lee who built a country

The diaspora's most consequential Lee governed from an island. Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀), a
Hakka whose family line ran back to Dabu County in Guangdong, became Singapore's founding
prime minister in 1959 and held the job until 1990, steering a resourceless port city into
one of the wealthiest societies on earth. He is also a walking exhibit of this page's
spelling map: a Chinese-descended Lee, English given name Harry, governing a
majority-Chinese country where the same surname answers to Lee, Li, and Lý depending on
which ancestor's boat you count. The name's talent for turning up wherever thrones,
brushes, and borders are being redrawn apparently extends to founding modern states.

### The Lee the whole world knows

Born in San Francisco in 1940 and raised in Hong Kong, Lee Jun-fan became the first global
Chinese film star and, by wide agreement, the most influential martial artist cinema has
produced. His screen name, Lee Siu-lung, means "Lee the Little Dragon," taken from the sign
of [the year he was born](/chinese-zodiac/dragon). Bruce Lee died at thirty-two having
permanently changed what the West imagined a Chinese man could be, and he did it wearing
the surname's most common overseas spelling. For millions of people, the first Li they ever
heard of was a Lee.

## If you carry the name

The surname is the inherited half of a Chinese name; the given name is the half somebody
chooses. If you are a Li or a Lee picking a Chinese given name to sit beside the family
character, our [name generator](/chinese-name) builds real ones the way Chinese parents do.
And the character, a tree over a child, has been beautiful in every script for three
thousand years: [the calligraphy tool renders 李 live](/chinese-calligraphy?c=李), free.

## Spellings

- Li · Mandarin (pinyin) · Mainland China, recent emigrants · The standard romanization. Pronounced "lee" with a dipping third tone.

- Lee · Older romanizations · Cantonese · Korean · Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, most of the diaspora · The most common overseas spelling, and the only big Chinese surname with a perfect English twin, so a Lee may be from Guangzhou, Seoul, or Yorkshire.

- Lý · Vietnamese · Vietnam · The same character; Vietnam's Lý dynasty preceded the Trần.

- Yi (이) · Korean · Korea · Korea's second most common surname family. The royal house of Joseon wrote it with this character.

- Rhee · Korean (older spelling) · Korea, Korean diaspora · Same Korean name, older Latin dress: Syngman Rhee, South Korea's first president, was a 李.

## FAQ

**What does the surname Li mean?**

The character 李 means plum, or plum tree, and unlike most giant surnames the meaning is a real dictionary word. But the traditional origin story does not start in an orchard: it starts with an office. The name is traced to the title of Minister of Justice (dàlǐ) held by the judge Gao Yao under the legendary Xia dynasty; his descendants carried the office's character 理 as a name, and it later shifted to the plum character 李, which sounds identical. The tree, in other words, is a homophone wearing the job title's clothes.

**Are Li and Lee the same name?**

For Chinese bearers, yes: Li is the pinyin spelling and Lee the older romanization still standard in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and most of the diaspora. The complication is that Lee is also a native English surname and the usual spelling of the Korean surname Yi. So Bruce Lee, Robert E. Lee, and South Korea's Lee dynasty descendants share letters but not always the character. For the Chinese and Korean Lees, the character is the same 李; the English Lees are an unrelated coincidence of spelling.

**Is Li the most common surname in the world?**

It is one of the two candidates, and the race is close. In mainland China's official figures Li runs a statistical photo-finish with Wang, each around 92 to 93 million. Count across all of Asia, though, and Li's case strengthens: the same character serves roughly a seventh of Koreans as Yi or Lee and millions of Vietnamese as Lý, giving the character well over 100 million bearers. By character, Li may be the biggest name on Earth; by country, Wang holds the Chinese crown.

**Is Lee a Chinese or Korean last name?**

Both, from the same character. In Korea, 李 reads as Yi (이) and commonly romanizes as Lee or Rhee; it is Korea's second most common surname family, and it was royal: the House of Yi founded the Joseon dynasty in 1392 and ruled Korea for over five hundred years, one of the longest runs of any royal house anywhere. A Korean Lee and a Chinese Li are writing the same character with different histories attached.

**How do you pronounce Li?**

Lǐ sounds like the English name "Lee," which is why it was spelled that way for a century, with one refinement: Mandarin gives it a dipping third tone, so the vowel sags and rises. English speakers who just say "Lee" are understood everywhere. The character is the same whether the tone lands or not; only the politeness of the attempt changes.

## Sources

- Li (surname 李): the Minister of Justice (理→李) origin, Laozi as first recorded bearer, Tang imperial bestowal, 93M bearers, Lee/Lý/Yi/Rhee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(surname_%E6%9D%8E)

- House of Yi: royal family of Joseon from 1392, imperial family of the Korean Empire, over 500 years; Syngman Rhee of the House of Yi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Yi

- Li Bai (701-762): standing beside Du Fu in the Golden Age of Chinese poetry; ~1,000 extant poems; the moon-embracing death told as legend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Bai

- Bruce Lee (Lee Jun-fan, 1940-1973): the first global Chinese film star; "Lee Siu-lung," the Little Dragon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee

- List of common Chinese surnames: Li at ~92.1 million, second in the MPS ranking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surnames

- Wang (surname): the photo-finish rival at the top of the table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_(surname)

- Li Qingzhao (1084-1155): the ci master; the collection lost to the fall of Kaifeng in 1127; ~100 surviving poems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Qingzhao

- Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀, 1923-2015): Singapore's founding prime minister, 1959-1990; Hakka ancestry from Dabu, Guangdong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew

- Wiktionary, 桃李: "peaches and plums" as a teacher's students; 桃李满天下: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%A1%83%E6%9D%8E

- The Surname Song (姓氏歌), the first-grade rhyme teaching 木子李, 弓长张, 耳东陈: the verbal spelling of the great surnames: https://www.jyeoo.com/shiti/f9410299-1553-4157-b5d3-ef443488f254