Xu in Chinese: 徐

Xu is written 徐 in Mandarin. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Xu 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.

徐 breaks down as 徐 (xú) — To walk without hurry: 彳余, a slow step — the pace of a state that trusted manners. The seal note we would put under it: The slow walk that outlived the kings who ran.

Pinyin: xú — 徐 is tone 2 (a rising pitch, like the start of a question). 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.

Yes. 徐 (xú) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. From Boyi, who helped Yu the Great tame the floods and was enfeoffed at Xu in the Huai river lands; the state outlived Xia and Shang and vanished only under Chu. The character walks: 彳余 is a slow, unhurried step — the pace of a kingdom that ruled by patience, and still the meaning of the word. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 徐 surname page — and that lineage is the reason a Western name can borrow the character for a surname at all.

徐 is built from 徐 — 徐 (xú) — 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 Xu are linked at the foot of this page.

Xu descends from Boyi, the helper of Yu the Great, enfeoffed in the Huai river lands where his house ruled so long that the state became a byword for patience — 徐 still means to walk without hurry. The slow step outlasted the bronzes that recorded the fast ones. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 徐 — is in the section above.