Anyone who has spent time in Taiwan knows that most people have three characters in their names. Usually the first character is the family name, followed by either a generational name and given name each with one character, or a two-character given name. I’ll call this format FGG (F for family, G for given/generational name).

It is possible, however, to have more or less than three characters in a name. Two-character names, while not as common as in China, are common enough that you will encounter them on a fairly regular basis. In the modern era these are all in the format FG. Four-character names seem to be a bit rarer. There are a number of two-character family names – like Sima, Ouyang, and Shangguan – which together with a two-character given name result in four characters (FFGG). There are also what I call double-barrelled names – like Huang Chen, Wu Jian, and Yang Gao – which are two single-character family names joined together. These are sometimes taken on marrying, usually but not always by women. With a two-character given name the format for these names is SFGG (S for spouse’s family name). Usually these double-barrelled names are not passed to the next generation, but there are exceptions like the Chang Liao family, a Hakka dynasty whose members include the current DPP legislator for Taichung 4, Chang Liao Wan-chien, and KMT Taichung city councillor Chang Liao Kui-chuan 張廖貴專.

The Dataset

I wanted to look at how prevalent these different kinds of names were, so I grabbed a dataset from Taiwan’s Central Election Commission. The data includes all the registered candidates for the following elections:

• Legislative Yuan (1995, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016)
• Special Municipality councils (1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014)
• County and Provincial City councils (1998, 2002, 2005, 2009, 2014)

I chose this data because it was easily accessible and represents a reasonable sample size. I left out the Aboriginal districts because I’m planning a separate post on Aboriginal names. The first pass yielded 11,569 names, but as candidates – especially successful ones – tend to stand in more than one election, the list was whittled down to 6,368 once duplicates and corrupt values [enter your own politician joke here] were removed.

There are a couple of issues with using election data rather than a more representative sample. Firstly, certain kinds of names are associated with certain ethnolinguistic groups, and it’s possible that that group is over- or underrepresented in electoral candidates. Secondly, I expect some degree of overrepresentation of “double-barrelled” family names among political candidates. Why? Some candidates add the family name of a more famous spouse/parent to increase voter recognition.

Character Count Frequency

So what can we discover from this list? First, let’s look at character count frequency.

If we exclude the two Ouyangs mentioned above, then 96.37% of our sample have three-character names. I couldn’t devise an easy way to check whether there are any instances of SFG names, i.e. a single-character given name added to a double-barrelled family name, so there may be a few of them in among the more typical FGG names.

Two-character Family Names

There are six instances of Ouyang and one of Shangguan in the data. The Shangguan and four of the Ouyangs are followed by two-character given names, while two of the Ouyangs have just a single-character given name afterwards.

Double-barrelled names

Subtracting the five instances of two-character surnames from the four-character names, we have 115 double-barrelled names. In testing my supposition about the gender of such names, I note that just 9 of the 115 entries are listed as male candidates. Taiwanese politics has traditionally been a male-dominated exercise, so it makes sense that most of the people adding a character for name recognition are women – older politicians tend to be men, and sons of famous male politicians already carry the same family name. In the full data only 21.64% of the candidates are women, but 92.17% of the candidates with double-barrelled names are women.

Wandering off on a tangent for a minute, one of the men, Shì Yáng Wùkōng 釋楊悟空, has practically the same name as Shi Wukong (the Tang dynasty monk who provided the inspiration for Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from Journey to the West). He added the character 釋 to his original name Yáng Wùkōng 楊悟空. 釋 is short for 釋迦牟尼 Shìjiāmóuní, a transliteration of Siddhartha (Gautama), the historical Buddha, and a name used by Buddhist monks in place of their original family name. Unfortunately when he stood in Hualien in 2012 his coreligionists failed to back him and he polled just 1.52% of the vote. He has now reverted to plain old Yang Wùkōng, and stood as such in the same district in 2016, pulling an even smaller 1.14% of the vote.

Longer names

Two candidates had names longer than four characters. The first, Lǚ Fànjiāng Hǎomèi 呂范姜好妹, seems to have added the suffix Hǎomèi 好妹 (“good little sister”) as a sobriquet to increase her memorability. The second person is [deep breath] Huáng Hóngchéng Táiwān Āchéng Shìjiè Wěirén Cáishén Zǒngtóng 黃宏成台灣阿成世界偉人財神總統, which would translate roughly as “Huang Hongcheng, Taiwan’s A-Cheng, Great Man of the World, Gold of Wealth, President”. And in case you were in any doubt as to the eccentricity of the man, here’s a video of his policy presentation (each candidate gets twelve minutes on local TV to set out their platform):

A trying day in the office for the sign language interpreter. On the strength of this performance, 2,037 Chiayi citizens cast their ballots for Mr Huang in the 2016 Legislative Yuan race (1.48% of the total).