# Zhang Surname: Meaning, Origin, and Why Chang and Cheung Are the Same Name

> Zhang, Chang, and Cheung are one Chinese surname (张), and it means to draw a bow. Its origin, why Chang is four different names, and which one is yours.

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

Zhang, Chang, and Cheung are one Chinese surname, 张, and it is the third most common name
in China, carried by something like 87 million people on the mainland alone. What makes it
odd is not the size. It is that almost every large Chinese surname is a noun, a king or a
place or a tree, and this one is a verb. The dictionary that has defined it for nineteen
centuries says it means to fit the string to a bow.

Which leaves the name living two lives at once. It is common enough that Chinese uses it as
a placeholder for anybody at all, and specific enough that one Zhang family has handed the
same religious office down the same bloodline since the year 142.

## Spellings heading

One name, seven spellings, and one spelling that belongs to somebody else

Most Chinese surnames reach the Latin alphabet through a dialect. Zhang goes through a
dialect and then through a filing system, which is why its two commonest spellings look
nothing alike and both belong to Mandarin speakers. Zhang is pinyin, standardized on the
mainland in the 1950s. Chang is Wade-Giles, the older British-built system that Taiwan's
passport office kept using for decades. Same province, same pronunciation, same character,
two different bureaucracies.

That last row is the trap, and it is worse than the table can show. Chang is not one name
wearing several hats; it is a parking space that several unrelated names have pulled into.
Wade-Giles spells 張 as Chang and also spells the separate surname 章 as Chang. Pinyin
spells the separate surname 常 as Chang. Macau writes 曾 as Chang, Peru writes 陳 as Chang,
and the Korean surname 장 is romanized Chang as well. Cantonese Cheung has a smaller
version of the same problem, covering both 張 and 章. If you want to know which one is
yours, the spelling cannot tell you and the character can, which is the single most useful
thing to know about Chinese names in English. The same trap catches
[Wong](/chinese-surnames/wang), and if you would rather read spellings as a map of who
sailed where, [Lin has the clearest case of it](/chinese-surnames/lin). Two other pages
carry the sharper versions of the Wade-Giles problem specifically. [Hsu](/chinese-surnames/xu)
is one spelling covering two Chinese surnames that Mandarin separates by tone alone, and
[Yang](/chinese-surnames/yang) is one spelling that crosses out of Chinese entirely, into
Korean, Vietnamese and Hmong.

## A surname that is a verb

Open the *Shuowen Jiezi*, the dictionary Xu Shen finished around 100 CE and still the first
place to look for where a Chinese character came from, and the entry for 張 is four
characters long. To fit the string to the bow. Composed of the bow radical, with 長 supplying
the sound.

Read that again, because the grammar is the point. It does not say "a bow." It does not say
"an archer." It says the act of stringing one, the moment of tension before anything is
released. Chinese surnames are almost never like this. Wang is a king. Li is a plum tree.
Chen is a place somebody came from. Liu began as a kind of axe. The third most common name
in the country is not a noun at all; it is something you do with your hands.

The character is seven strokes and it splits cleanly down the middle. On the left is 弓, a
bow drawn as a bow, three strokes of a stave bent back on itself. On the right is 长, which
is there for the sound rather than the meaning, and which happens to mean long, so the
character looks like a long bow whether or not anyone planned it that way.

The verb never really left. Modern Mandarin still uses the same word for opening anything
that spreads out, and it is the standard measure word for flat things, so a Chinese speaker
counts one *zhang* of paper, one *zhang* of table, one *zhang* of face. The surname of eighty
million people is also the word you use to order a sheet of A4.

If you want to watch a calligrapher hold the bow tight and then let the last stroke go,
[our calligraphy tool draws 张 in six classical scripts](/chinese-calligraphy?c=张) for free.

## The man who was given a job and got a family

Every Zhang genealogy starts with an invention.

The story goes that Hui, a descendant of the Yellow Emperor through his fifth son, looked up
at the constellation Chinese astronomy calls the Heavenly Bow, worked out how the thing might
be built, and made the first bow and arrow. The court gave him the office of First Bow and
then, in the neat way these stories have, gave him the job as a name. His descendants have
been Zhangs ever since.

It is a very good story and it is genealogy rather than history. Nobody has a Shang or Zhou
document naming Hui; what exists are family records compiled thousands of years after the
fact by people who already carried the name and wanted to know where it came from. That is
worth saying plainly rather than passing over, and it costs the story nothing. What the
legend actually preserves is a real and old idea about how Chinese surnames worked, which is
that a great many of them began as occupations handed down until the job disappeared and only
the label was left. The Zhangs are the case where you can still read the job in the letters.

## Chinese for "some guy"

Here is the strange thing about being enormous.

When Chinese needs a name for a person who is nobody in particular, the way English reaches
for John Doe or Tom, Dick, and Harry, it reaches for this one. The idiom is Zhang Three and
Li Four, and it means anybody at all, the man in the street, whoever. [Li](/chinese-surnames/li),
the name in the second half of it, sits directly above Zhang in the rankings. Between them
and [Wang](/chinese-surnames/wang) they account for something like a fifth of the country, so
the language did the sensible thing and drafted the two of them as variables.

The numbers behind that are worth a second. A 2007 count put roughly 87.5 million Zhangs on
the mainland, about 6.83 percent of the population. Zhang is third nationally and third in
Taiwan, which is unusual in itself, since most Chinese surnames shift rank wildly the moment
you cross a strait or a provincial border. This one does not really move. It is not a
southern name or a northern name. It is simply everywhere, which is exactly why the idiom
picked it.

## The one Zhang family that is nobody's placeholder

And then, inside the most generic surname in China, the least generic family in Chinese
religion.

In the year 142, on a mountain in Sichuan called Heming, a man named Zhang Daoling reported
that Laozi, by then long dead and thoroughly deified, had appeared to him and handed over
what he called the Doctrine of the Orthodox One. Zhang built a working theocracy out of it in
the hills, divided into parishes, and outsiders nicknamed the movement the Way of Five Pecks
of Rice after the grain tax he levied on members. This is roughly where organized Daoism, as
opposed to Daoist philosophy, begins.

What happened next is the part almost nothing else in world religion can match. The office
passed to Zhang Daoling's son, Zhang Heng, and then to his grandson Zhang Lu, and it kept
going. The title of Celestial Master has descended through that bloodline for nineteen
centuries. The sixty-third holder, Zhang Enpu, left the mainland for Taiwan in 1949 with the
retreating Nationalist government and took the office with him; since he died the succession
has been contested between branches in Taiwan and on the mainland, and this page is not going
to pretend that argument is settled.

Two honest qualifications. The details of Zhang Daoling's own life come almost entirely from
hagiography written well after he lived, so the founder is a firmer figure in religion than
in the historical record. And a hereditary office is not a family business: Daoism is vastly
larger than one lineage, and the Celestial Masters hold one seat inside it, not the building.
Still, the arithmetic stands. One surname, one office, since the second century. The
[Jade Emperor](/chinese-mythology/jade-emperor) who sits at the top of the celestial
bureaucracy is presiding over a court that this tradition largely furnished.

One small trap while we are here: the Zhang Heng who inherited the Celestial Master title is
not the Zhang Heng in the next section. The name is too common for that kind of luck.

## Four lives of the name

### The man who walked west

In 138 BCE the Han emperor sent a court attendant named Zhang Qian west with about a hundred
men to find allies against the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu caught him almost immediately and kept
him for thirteen years. He married, had a child, and did not give up the emperor's staff of
office. Then he escaped, kept going west instead of turning around, and came back in 125 BCE
with two survivors and the single most valuable report in Han history.

There were, he told the throne, large settled states out there, farming much the way China
did: Ferghana, Bactria, Parthia, with cities and coined silver and horses that were said to
sweat blood. Nobody at court had known. Within a few years the Han were sending embassies
west by the dozen, and the roads those embassies wore down are the ones later centuries would
call the Silk Road. It exists, in part, because one man was captured and refused to consider
the trip canceled.

### The man who felt an earthquake 400 miles away

Zhang Heng, who lived from 78 to 139 and did everything, built a machine in 132 that has been
argued about ever since. It was a bronze vessel with eight dragons around the outside, each
holding a ball above an open-mouthed bronze toad, and it was meant to drop one ball in the
direction of a distant earthquake.

One day it dropped a ball toward the northwest and nobody in Luoyang had felt a thing. The
court decided the instrument was junk. Several days later a messenger arrived from Gansu, 400
to 500 kilometers away, reporting an earthquake. That was in the second century, and it is
still the earliest recorded instance of anyone detecting a quake they could not feel. Zhang
also built a water-powered armillary sphere, cataloged some 2,500 stars, and wrote poetry
good enough to be anthologized, which suggests he was insufferable at parties.

### The writer who left

Eileen Chang was born Zhang Ailing in Shanghai in 1920, into the wreckage of a distinguished
family, and she wrote the two novellas that made her reputation, *Love in a Fallen City* and
*The Golden Cangue*, in 1943, while the city was under Japanese occupation. She was
twenty-three. Nobody in modern Chinese literature writes cruelty inside a family better.

In 1952 she understood that there was no future for her writing on the mainland and left for
Hong Kong, and later for the United States. She kept working for another four decades, and
one of the last things she wrote, *Lust, Caution*, would be filmed long after her death. She
was found in her apartment in Westwood, Los Angeles, in September 1995, having died of heart
disease a few days earlier. Her instructions were carried out exactly: cremation, no service,
ashes into the Pacific. She had spent her life declining to explain herself and did not stop
at the end.

### The farmhand who opened the Olympics

Zhang Yimou spent the Cultural Revolution doing farm labor and then working in a textile
mill. When the universities reopened he talked his way into the Beijing Film Academy in 1978,
part of a class that would remake Chinese cinema. *Red Sorghum* took the Golden Bear at
Berlin in 1988, *Raise the Red Lantern* got him an international audience in 1991, and *Hero*
in 2002 proved that a Chinese film could be a global blockbuster.

Then, in 2008, he directed the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics for an
audience of something like a billion people, and in 2022 he did it again for the Winter
Games, becoming the only person ever to stage both. A man who had been assigned to a mill
because of his family background ended up designing how his country introduces itself to the
world. The name that means to draw a bow has produced a lot of that particular arc.

## If you carry the name

The surname is the half of a Chinese name that arrives with you; the given name is the half
somebody sat down and chose. If you are a Zhang, a Chang, a Cheung, or a Teoh looking for a
Chinese given name to stand beside the bow, our [name generator](/chinese-name) builds real
ones the way Chinese parents do, out of meaning and sound rather than off a list. And the
character has been one of the most satisfying shapes in the language to write for three
thousand years, because half of it is under tension and the other half is released:
[the calligraphy tool renders 张 live](/chinese-calligraphy?c=张), free. If the spelling
problem in the table above is the part that interested you, the name that has it worst is
[Ng](/chinese-surnames/wu).

## Spellings

- Zhang · Mandarin (pinyin) · Mainland China, Taiwan, recent emigrants · The standard romanization. The zh is the sound in "jam" with the tongue curled back, so it comes out nearer "jahng" than anything with a z in it.

- Chang · Mandarin (Wade-Giles) · Taiwan, older overseas families, many Chinese Americans · The pre-pinyin spelling of the same syllable. A Chang and a Zhang from the same village are the same family filed by two different clerks.

- Cheung · Cantonese · Hong Kong, Macau · The Cantonese reading. The vowel is longer and the ending is a hard g, which is why it looks so far from the Mandarin.

- Cheong · Cantonese, Hakka, Gan · Macau, Malaysia, Singapore · A second Cantonese spelling, used where Portuguese rather than English spelling habits got there first.

- Teoh / Teo · Hokkien, Teochew · Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand · The Southern Min reading, and unrecognizable as the same name unless somebody tells you.

- Trương · Vietnamese · Vietnam · The same character in Vietnamese, carried in by the same families and kept.

- Jang · Korean (장) · Korea · The Korean reading of the character, also romanized Chang, which is where a good deal of the confusion comes from.

- Chang, for 常 · Mandarin (pinyin) · Mainland China · Not this name. 常 is its own surname, meaning constant, and in pinyin it is spelled Chang. Two unrelated families, one set of letters.

## FAQ

**Are Zhang, Chang, and Cheung the same surname?**

Usually yes. All three commonly write 张, the third most common surname in China. Zhang is the pinyin spelling used on the mainland, Chang is the older Wade-Giles spelling that Taiwan and most Chinese American families kept, and Cheung is the Cantonese reading used in Hong Kong and Macau. The catch is Chang, which is also the pinyin spelling of the unrelated surname 常 and the Wade-Giles spelling of the unrelated surname 章, and which is used for the Korean surname Jang too. The letters cannot settle it. The character can, and every family knows which one is theirs.

**What does the surname Zhang mean?**

It means to draw a bow, and unusually for a Chinese surname it is an action rather than a thing. The Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, completed around 100 CE, defines it in four characters as fitting the string to the bow, and notes that the character is built from the bow radical with a phonetic beside it. From that original sense it spread out to mean opening or stretching anything, which is why modern Mandarin uses the same word to count flat things: one zhang of paper, one zhang of table, one zhang of face.

**How common is the surname Zhang?**

Third in China, behind only Wang and Li, and third in Taiwan as well. A 2007 count put about 87.5 million bearers on the mainland, roughly 6.83 percent of the population, which is a little more than the population of Germany carrying one name. Being that common has a linguistic side effect: Zhang is the surname Chinese reaches for when it needs a name that means nobody in particular, in the idiom Zhang Three and Li Four, the equivalent of any Tom, Dick, or Harry.

**Is the surname Chang always Zhang?**

No, and this is the most common mistake made with the name. Chang is a spelling several unrelated Chinese surnames share. Most Changs are 张, spelled the pre-pinyin way. But 常 is a different surname spelled Chang in pinyin, 章 is a different surname spelled Chang in Wade-Giles, Macau spells 曾 as Chang, Peru spells 陳 as Chang, and the Korean surname 장 is often written Chang. A Chang in Taipei and a Chang in Lima may share nothing but the alphabet.

**How do you pronounce the surname Zhang?**

Roughly "jahng," with a level high tone, the vowel of "father" and the ending of "sung." The zh is not a z sound; it is the j of "jam" made with the tongue tip curled back toward the roof of the mouth, which is why the older Wade-Giles system wrote it Chang. Cantonese Cheung is closer to "cheung" as spelled, with a longer vowel, and the Hokkien Teoh sounds like "tio." All of them are the same syllable filtered through different sound systems.

## Sources

- Shuowen Jiezi entry for 張: to fit the string to a bow, composed of the bow radical with 長 as phonetic: https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=gb&char=%E5%BC%B5

- Zhang (surname): the bow etymology, the Hui legend and the Heavenly Bow constellation, third rank in mainland China and Taiwan, about 87.50 million bearers at 6.83 percent in 2007, and the romanizations Chang, Cheung, Cheong, Chong, Teoh, Teo, Trương and Jang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_(surname)

- Chang (surname): the surnames that share the spelling, including 常 in pinyin, 章 and 張 in Wade-Giles, 曾 in Macau, 陳 in Peru, and Korean 장: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_(surname)

- Zhang Daoling: the 142 CE revelation on Mount Heming, the Doctrine of the Orthodox One, the Way of Five Pecks of Rice and its tax, and the succession through his son Zhang Heng and grandson Zhang Lu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Daoling

- Way of the Celestial Masters: the hereditary line, the 63rd Celestial Master Zhang Enpu moving to Taiwan in 1949, and the succession dispute after his death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_of_the_Celestial_Masters

- Zhang Qian: the mission west from 138 BCE, thirteen years held by the Xiongnu, the return in 125 BCE, and the reports on Dayuan, Daxia and Anxi that opened the Silk Road: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Qian

- Zhang Heng: the 132 CE seismoscope, the Gansu earthquake it registered 400 to 500 km from Luoyang, the water-powered armillary sphere, and the catalogue of some 2,500 stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Heng

- Eileen Chang: Love in a Fallen City and The Golden Cangue in 1943, the move to Hong Kong in 1952, and her death in Westwood, Los Angeles in September 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Chang

- Zhang Yimou: farm and mill labor during the Cultural Revolution, the Beijing Film Academy in 1978, the Golden Bear for Red Sorghum in 1988, and both Beijing Olympic ceremonies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yimou

- 張三李四: the standing Chinese idiom for any random person, literally Zhang Three and Li Four: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%BC%B5%E4%B8%89%E6%9D%8E%E5%9B%9B