# Hsu Surname: Meaning, Origin, and Why Hsu Is Two Different Names

> Hsu and Xu are the same Chinese surname 徐, meaning to walk unhurried. But Hsu also spells a second, unrelated surname, and only tone separates them.

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

Hsu and Xu are the same Chinese surname, 徐, the eleventh most common in China, and the
character means to walk unhurried. Hsu is the older spelling that Taiwan kept and pinyin is
the one the mainland standardized, so the two are a filing difference rather than a family
one.

The complication is that Hsu also spells a second Chinese surname that has nothing to do with
this one. In Mandarin the two are told apart by tone alone: this name rises, the other one
dips and comes back up. English writes neither, so at the moment the name is romanized, one
of the two things distinguishing the families is simply deleted.

## Spellings heading

One name, nine spellings, and one spelling shared with a name it is not

Xu spreads across the alphabet the way most large Chinese surnames do, through dialects and
through two competing romanization systems. Then it does one thing extra, which is share its
commonest English spelling with an entirely separate surname. The last two rows are the ones
to read carefully.

That last row is the whole problem in one line. English-language sources are so aware of it
that reference works file the two names as two separate articles with the characters in the
titles, because there is no other way to keep them apart. If you carry this name and want to
know which one is yours, the letters cannot help you and one glance at the character
can. That is the single most useful thing to know about Chinese surnames in English, and it
catches [Wang and Wong](/chinese-surnames/wang) and
[Zhang and Chang](/chinese-surnames/zhang) in their own ways too.

## Two names, one spelling, and a tone

Most Chinese surnames that collide in English collide for an obvious reason. Several families
sound similar, or an old spelling and a new spelling look different enough to confuse people.
This one collides for a reason that is much more interesting, and slightly infuriating, which
is that the distinction exists perfectly well in Chinese and English throws it away.

There are two big Chinese surnames pronounced with the same consonant and the same vowel. One
is 徐, and it rises. The other is 許, and it dips down and comes back up. In Mandarin those are
two entirely different words, as different as "bat" and "pat," and no Chinese speaker has ever
confused them. Pinyin spells the first Xu and the second Xu. Wade-Giles spells the first Hsu
and the second Hsu.

The result is that English-language reference works cannot file them under their names. They
have to file them under their characters, which is how you end up with two separate
encyclopedia articles whose titles are identical except for a Chinese character in brackets,
sitting a few places apart in the same set of search results.

This page is about the first one. If your family writes 許, a great deal of what follows is
somebody else's history.

## How to actually say it

Since this is the thing people ask most, here it is properly.

The consonant is the hardest sound in Mandarin for English speakers, and both romanizations
are misleading about it in opposite directions. Pinyin writes it x, which suggests a k sound
that is not there at all. Wade-Giles writes it hs, which at least tells you something is
hissing but makes it look like an aspirated h.

What it actually is: put the tip of your tongue down behind your lower front teeth and hold it
there. Now raise the middle of your tongue toward the roof of your mouth and push air through
the gap. That is a thinner, brighter hiss than the English sh, made further forward, and it is
the same sound at the front of Xi'an and Xiao and Xie.

The vowel is the German ü. Say "ee," and then, without moving your tongue at all, round your
lips as if for "oo."

Put them together and add a rising pitch, as though you were asking a question. The English
approximation everybody uses is "shoo," and honestly, "shoo" with rounded lips and a rising
tone will be understood by anyone. The lips are what matter most; the tongue position is
polish.

## A surname that means taking your time

Open the *Shuowen Jiezi*, the dictionary Xu Shen finished around 100 CE, and the entry runs to
three characters: unhurried walking.

The character shows it. On the left is 彳, a radical that turns up in a whole family of words
about going somewhere, and which is itself the left half of the character for a crossroads. On
the right is a component supplying the sound. Ten strokes, and one of a small number of Chinese
surnames where the simplified and traditional forms are the same, so nobody in the family has
to decide which one to write on a wedding invitation.

The word never went out of use, and it kept its unhurriedness. The *Zhuangzi* has a wheelwright
describe the perfect stroke of his chisel as neither slow nor fast, got by the hand and answered
in the heart. The *Art of War* puts it in the most famous four-line description of an army ever
written: swift as the wind, and in its slowness like a forest. And Su Shi opens the *Red Cliff
Rhapsody*, which is roughly the Chinese equivalent of the opening of *Moby-Dick* for sheer
quotability, with a clear breeze coming on slowly and the water not rising into waves. That
word for slowly is this surname.

None of which is where the surname came from. That is the honest bit, and most name-meaning
pages skip it: Chinese surnames overwhelmingly come from places and titles rather than from
what their characters mean, and the meaning is a happy accident sitting on top. Still, of all
the accidents to be landed with, a name that means take your time is a good one.

If you want to watch a brush take its time over it, our
[calligraphy tool draws 徐 in six classical scripts](/chinese-calligraphy?c=徐).

## The state that gave its name to a province

The real origin is a country that lost a war.

There was a state called Xu, in what is now northern Jiangsu and Anhui, and its ruling house
carried the clan name Ying. The traditional genealogy runs back to Ruo Mu, a son of Bo Yi, the
minister who helped Yu the Great control the floods, which is the standard way a Chinese
lineage says "we go back to the beginning." Xu was one of the eastern states, outside the Zhou
heartland, and eventually the state of Wu destroyed it.

The survivors did what displaced Chinese families did: they took the name of the place they had
lost and wore it. That is why the surname is still concentrated in Jiangsu today, more than two
and a half thousand years later, and why one of the Nine Provinces of ancient geography, and a
city of several million people now, is called Xuzhou. The state is gone. Its name is carried by
about twenty million people and a railway junction.

## The man who sailed east for the drug that stops death

And now the best Xu of all, who is barely a person and mostly a rumor.

In 219 BCE the First Emperor of China, who had unified the country and was in the process of
discovering that this did not make him immortal, was approached by a court specialist named Xu
Fu with a proposal. There were islands in the eastern sea where immortals lived, and on them
grew the drug that ends death. Give him ships and he would fetch it.

He was given ships. He was also given, according to the accounts, three thousand boys and
girls, and craftsmen, and seed grain. He sailed east.

He did not come back.

What happened next is the part that has kept the story alive for two thousand years, because
Japan thinks it knows. Shingu, in Wakayama prefecture, claims to be where he landed, and has a
park dedicated to him. He is venerated at shrines in several parts of Japan, and not as a
sorcerer or a fraud but as a god of farming, a god of medicine and a god of silk, which is to
say as the man who brought the technology. Whether any of it happened is entirely unprovable
and the shrines are entirely real, which is a combination this site runs into a lot.

The drug he was sent for is the same drug that turns up all over Chinese myth, and it never
does anybody any good. [Hou Yi was given it and lost it](/chinese-mythology/hou-yi). The
[rabbit on the moon](/chinese-mythology/jade-rabbit) has been grinding out batches of it since
the Han dynasty for an emperor who is long dead. The First Emperor, still waiting for Xu Fu's
ships, is thought to have hastened his own end taking mercury preparations meant to do the same
job.

## The Xu family's confluence

Fifteen hundred years later, another Xu changed the country in a quieter way.

Xu Guangqi was born in 1562 in what was then a minor town on the Yangtze delta. He met the
Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, was baptized as Paul, and in 1607 the two of them published a
Chinese translation of the first six books of Euclid's *Elements*. It is difficult to overstate
how strange that must have been from both sides: a Ming official and a Renaissance Jesuit
sitting down together to find Chinese words for point, line, parallel and theorem, several of
which Xu invented and all of which are still the standard terms.

He died in 1633 and was buried on his family's land outside the town. The land was at a
confluence of creeks, and it was known as the place where the Xu family gathered. The town grew
into Shanghai; the family land became a Jesuit compound with a cathedral, a library and an
observatory; and the district is called Xujiahui to this day, which means, quite literally, the
Xu family's confluence. Several million people change subway lines there every week under a
name that is one man's surname and one man's back garden.

## Still going somewhere

The surname kept producing people who would not sit still.

Xu Xiake spent thirty years of the late Ming walking around China and writing down what he saw,
in geographical detail nobody had attempted before, and his journal opens on a day in 1613 in
Ninghai. In 2011 the State Council picked a date for a national tourism day and, after a public
poll that drew close to a million votes, chose that one: 19 May, the day a man in his twenties
set out on foot. The painter Xu Beihong, who died in 1953, went the other way, taking European
anatomy training back into Chinese ink and producing the galloping horses that hang in about
half the Chinese restaurants on earth.

For a name that means unhurried, it has covered a remarkable amount of ground.

## Spellings

- Xu · Mandarin (pinyin) · Mainland China, recent emigrants · The mainland standard. The x is not the x of "box" and not quite the sh of "she"; it is made with the tongue flat and the tip down behind the lower teeth, which is why English speakers find it so hard to place.

- Hsu · Mandarin (Wade-Giles) · Taiwan, older overseas families, most Chinese Americans · The pre-pinyin spelling of the same syllable. A Hsu in Taipei and a Xu in Nanjing are the same name filed by two different bureaucracies.

- Tsui / Chui · Cantonese · Hong Kong, Macau · The Cantonese reading, and unrecognizable as the same name unless somebody tells you. The director Tsui Hark writes his surname this way.

- Choi · Cantonese · Hong Kong, diaspora · A second Cantonese spelling, and a busy one, since Choi is also used for several unrelated Chinese and Korean surnames.

- Chhî / Sû · Hokkien · Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines · The Southern Min readings, carried out with Hokkien-speaking families.

- Zee · Wu · Shanghai, Suzhou, Ningbo · The Shanghainese-area reading. Jiangsu is where this surname is most concentrated, so Zee is the local sound of a very local name.

- Từ · Vietnamese · Vietnam · The same character read in Vietnamese, usually written Tu once the diacritics are dropped in English.

- Seo (서) · Korean · Korea, Korean diaspora · The Korean reading of the character, also romanized So or Suh. A Korean surname with its own clan records rather than this family carried abroad.

- Hsu / Xu, for 許 · Mandarin · Everywhere · Not this name. 許 is a separate and also very common surname, spelled Xu in pinyin and Hsu in Wade-Giles exactly like this one. In Mandarin the tones differ and settle it; in English nothing does. It is also spelled Hui, Hooi, Koh and Kho in southern dialects.

## FAQ

**Is Hsu Cantonese or Mandarin?**

Mandarin. Hsu is the Wade-Giles spelling of the Mandarin reading, which is why it is the standard form in Taiwan and among Chinese American families who emigrated before pinyin took hold on the mainland in the 1950s. The Cantonese reading of the same character is quite different and is spelled Tsui, Chui or Choi. So a Hsu is almost certainly from a Mandarin-speaking background and a Tsui from a Cantonese-speaking one, even though both are writing 徐.

**How do you pronounce Hsu surname?**

Close to "shoo," but with a sound English does not have. The initial is neither the s of "sue" nor quite the sh of "shoe": you make it with the tip of the tongue held down behind the lower front teeth and the middle of the tongue raised toward the hard palate, which produces a thinner, more forward hiss than English sh. The vowel is the German ü or French u, made by saying "ee" and then rounding your lips without moving your tongue. The tone rises, like the end of an English question. "Shoo" said with rounded lips and a rising pitch will be understood everywhere.

**Is Hsu a Vietnamese name?**

Not as spelled. The Vietnamese form of this surname is Từ, which becomes Tu in English once the diacritics are dropped, and it is carried by families of Chinese descent in Vietnam as well as by Vietnamese families in their own right. Hsu itself is a Wade-Giles spelling built for Mandarin, so a Hsu is far more likely to be Taiwanese or Chinese American than Vietnamese. Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese all drew on the same stock of characters, which is why so many East Asian surnames look related in English.

**What is the origin of the last name Hsu?**

A state that no longer exists. The surname traces to the ancient state of Xu, in what is now northern Jiangsu and Anhui, whose ruling family carried the Ying clan name and descended by tradition from Ruo Mu, a son of Bo Yi, who assisted Yu the Great with the floods. When the state of Xu was destroyed by the state of Wu, its people took the name of the homeland they had lost and made it a surname. That homeland is also why one of the Nine Provinces of ancient China, and a large city in Jiangsu today, is called Xuzhou.

**What does the surname Xu mean?**

To walk slowly, or to go unhurried. The Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, glosses it in three characters as unhurried walking, and the character is built from the step radical 彳 with a phonetic beside it. The sense is still alive: the opening of Su Shi's Red Cliff Rhapsody, one of the most quoted lines in Chinese prose, uses this word for a clear breeze arriving slowly over still water. As a surname it is not derived from that meaning, though, but from the state of Xu, which merely happened to be written with the character.

## Sources

- The dictionary entry for 徐, with the Shuowen gloss of unhurried walking, the composition from 彳 with 余 as phonetic, and the citations from Su Shi's Red Cliff Rhapsody, the Zhuangzi and the Art of War: https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E5%BE%90

- Xu (surname 徐): the state of Xu, Ruo Mu son of Bo Yi and the Ying clan name, the fall of Xu to Wu, eleventh rank among Chinese surnames, concentration in Jiangsu, and the romanizations Hsu, Tsui, Chui, Choi, Zee, Chhî, Sû, Từ and Seo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_(surname_%E5%BE%90)

- Xu (surname 許): the separate surname that shares the spellings Xu and Hsu, distinguished in Mandarin only by tone, and its southern spellings Hui, Hooi, Koh and Kho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_(surname_%E8%A8%B1)

- Xu Fu: the fleet sent east in 219 BCE by Qin Shi Huang with three thousand boys and girls to find the elixir of immortality, and the expedition that never returned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Fu

- Xu Fu in Japan: the Shingu claim to be his landing place, the park dedicated to him in Wakayama, and his worship as a god of farming, medicine and silk (Green Shinto): https://www.greenshinto.com/tag/xu-fu/

- Xu Guangqi: born 1562, his meeting with Matteo Ricci, his baptism as Paul, the 1607 translation of the first six books of Euclid's Elements, his death in 1633 and his tomb in Shanghai: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Guangqi

- The Xujiahui legacy: how a district of Shanghai came to be named after the Xu family's land, and the cathedral and observatory built on it (China Today): http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/english/china/2014-06/04/content_622509.htm

- China Tourism Day: designated by the State Council in 2011 and fixed on 19 May, the date Xu Xiake opened his travel journal in 1613: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Tourism_Day

- China's National Tourism Day set in memory of an ancient travel writer: the 1613 opening in Ninghai, the thirty years of travel, and the online poll behind the date (Visit Beijing): https://english.visitbeijing.com.cn/article/47OO6Dsiv5m

- Tsui Hark: the Hong Kong director, and the Cantonese spelling of the same surname: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsui_Hark

- Xu Beihong, 1895 to 1953: the painter who put Western anatomy into Chinese ink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Beihong