Jade in Chinese: 玉

Jade is written 玉 in Mandarin. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Jade rather than to transliterate it letter by letter, which is how Chinese names are actually made. On this page the seal is carved in the Zhongshan King (中山王) bronze-inscription seal script, with the Academia Sinica Chongxi Small Seal (崇羲篆體) filling any character the main font lacks.

玉 breaks down as 玉 (yù) — Jade: in China the substance of virtue — the gentleman is compared to it. The seal note we would put under it: The only gem a culture called morality.

Pinyin: yù — 玉 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop). Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone, and getting them wrong is the most common mistake Western speakers make with Chinese names — the seal itself is unaffected, since the carving is of the written form.

玉 is built from 玉 — 玉 (yù) — and no other curated name on this site shares that combination, because each entry is built around its own sound and its own meaning rather than recycled syllables. Names that start the same way as Jade are linked at the foot of this page.

Two origins meeting at one stone: Spanish piedra de ijada, the “flank stone” ships carried west, and 玉, the Chinese substance of virtue. Confucius compared the gentleman to jade; the name means that on both sides of the Pacific. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 玉 — is in the section above.