Many people know that Zhu Yuanzhang was the man who founded the Ming Dynasty, but they may not know that Zhu Yuanzhang invented a naming rule that has been used for more than seven hundred years and is still in use today. Before talking about this naming rule, let’s first look at Zhu Yuanzhang’s name.
Zhu Yuanzhang was not called Zhu Yuanzhang at first but Zhu Chongba. Why is it called Zhu Chongba? This is related to the naming policy of the Yuan Dynasty at that time. The Yuan Dynasty stipulated that ordinary people could not be given formal names, but could only be given names based on ranking or the sum of the ages of their parents.
For example, Zhu Yuanzhang’s great-grandfather was named Sijiu, which should be the sum of the ages of his parents at the time of birth. And Zhu Yuanzhang's grandfather was named Chuyi, which is the seniority. Zhu Yuanzhang's father's name is Zhu Wusi, which is his age. When he arrived at Zhu Yuanzhang, he became Zhu Chongba according to his seniority. To give another example, Zhu Yuanzhang's opponent Zhang Shicheng, his name was originally Zhang Jiusi.
Later, Zhu Yuanzhang felt that his Chongba name was too rustic and unpleasant, so he personally changed his name to Zhu Yuanzhang. The meaning is very clear, he is a Zhang of Zhu Yuan. He did succeed, destroyed the Yuan Dynasty and became emperor. In terms of naming, Zhu Yuanzhang felt that it was necessary to give his descendants a good name, and he could not let his descendants continue to be called like this. So, he systematically arranged a naming method. There are two characters in the name. The first character is the character for generation. He carefully arranged a line of characters for his grandchildren, and everyone will follow this character in the future.
Zhu Youjian and so on.
The advantage of this is that it is not easy to repeat names, and it is not easy to have the problem of a grandson having the same name as a certain great ancestor. And now, the seniority is very clear. Unlike Liu Bei, who claims to be the Queen of Zhongshan Prince Jing, even Liu Bei himself may not be sure whether he is.
Okay, let’s talk about the second character in the name. This character is more distinctive. It is based on the five elements: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. These radicals must be used in order in the text. For example, if the father uses the radical "fire", the son must use the radical "earth".
This meaning is very good, the five elements are interdependent and endless, but in fact it is very troublesome, because some radicals do not have many characters, such as the radicals of earth and the radicals of gold. Therefore, the Zhu family later made a big effort to create characters and created many strange characters. No one knew them, except the Zhu family. I won’t give examples of the names of the five elements. The last character of the emperor’s name listed above is the radical of the five elements. However, this rule does not apply to the descendants of Prince Jingjiang, the great nephew of Ming Taizu. To this day, the descendants of Zhu Yuanzhang still Use this system for naming.