Zhu Yuanzhang's original name was not Zhu Baba, but Zhu Chongba, which was also obtained according to the tradition of the time. Because the name Zhu Baba sounds cute, many people on the Internet call him that. In the Yuan Dynasty, there was a rather strange way of naming, which was to add the ages of the parents as the child's name or the child's date of birth, so many people's names were composed of numbers. For example, if the father's age is 25 and the mother's age is 24, so the child is 25 24 = 49, the child will be called 49, or if the child was born on May 6, it will be called 56.
But Zhu Yuanzhang’s name is not the same. He is not the sum of his parents’ ages, nor his date of birth. He is named according to their family’s genealogy. This generation of their family is called “Chong”. , he is the eighth in the family, so he is called Zhu Chongba. His eldest brother is named Zhu Chongyi, and the names from other clans are chosen in order. But Zhu Yuanzhang's father's name is Zhu Wusi, and his grandfather's name is Zhu Chuyi, both of which are numbers or specific dates. Later, Zhu Yuanzhang established the Ming Dynasty and became Ming Taizu, and then changed his name to Yuanzhang, which means a weapon to destroy the Yuan Dynasty.
In fact, people in the Yuan Dynasty had no choice but to choose names like this. The main reason was that the people at that time did not have much education, and people who did not go to school or were not officials did not have serious names, so they chose names. It is mainly simple and convenient, but it also leads to the phenomenon of many duplicate names. It is also inconvenient for the government to register the population because the names are all numbers.
In fact, because Zhu Yuanzhang also came from a poor family and did not read much, before changing his name to Zhu Yuanzhang, he also changed his name to Xingzong Guo, and later changed his name to Zhu Yuanzhang, with the courtesy name Guorui, which is more auspicious. Later, Zhu Yuanzhang stipulated that the names of future generations should be based on the radicals of the Yin and Yang and the Five Elements. Therefore, the names of the Ming Dynasty emperors were all characters from the periodic table of elements, and many of the characters were relatively obscure. But now that we have universalized compulsory education, we also have to pay a lot of attention to names, and we no longer use numbers like the Yuan Dynasty.