A while ago I was playing around with some Chinese names data and found that people preferred shorter (one-character) names before the 1990s but that the trend was quickly reversed in more recent years.

I didn't think much of the finding, because it seems easily explained by..

Greater openness of society/marketization leading to more expressions of individualism.

But a friend pointed me towards a Chinese economist's blog post looking at name lengths in Chinese dynasties. Turns out that Ming and Qing saw similar trends!

(Chart credit goes to Chen Qin)

The source of the historical data is jinshilu, i.e. lists of top scorers of the imperial exam.

The economist Chen Qin also checked that the geographic distribution of the top scorers remained largely the same over time.

Here's the historical and the contemporary side-by-side:

Chen is puzzled by the Ming and Qing data, because in order to explain the drastic change in name length, we would need to find a variable that takes on

1) large values at the beginning and at the end of a dynasty; AND
2) small values in all the other years.

Chen also notes that except for the short-lived Yuan dynasty led by Kublai Khan (1279–1368), all the other dynasties saw their average name length going up as they were about to collapse.

Ming and Qing collapsed when people's names became longer than when the dynasties started.

We don't have rich data going back further, but historian Zhang Shuyan tabulated all names that appeared in Chinese history classics that survived.

Turns out that few elites in the Han/Jin/Warring States periods had 2-char names b/c they were deemed a marker of low social class.

Wang Mang, a Han official who lived from 45 BC to 23 AD, even banned two-character names because he thought they were improper by Confucian traditions.

Another anecdote is that almost all characters in Romance of the Three Kingdoms have one-character names.

I'm not sure what any of this means, but it certainly gave me a fresh perspectives on names.

Who knew that one or two characters could connote not only one's lineage, social class, family aspirations, gender identity, but also the rise and fall of dynasties!