Yang in Chinese: 杨

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

杨 breaks down as 杨 (yang) — A poplar, tall and quick-growing — the surname of imperial builders. The seal note we would put under it: Tall and fast-rising.

Pinyin: yang — 杨 is tone 5 (short and light). 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. 杨 (yang) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. From the ducal house of Jin. A ministerial family, the Yangshe, held the town of Yang as fief and took its name at last as their own — the poplar, too, in the writing, and the state of Yang before either. The Hongdong Yang clan of the Tang age gave the surname its gold crest, and empresses and chancellors signed the name for centuries. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 杨 surname page — and that lineage is the reason a Western name can borrow the character for a surname at all.

杨 is built from 杨 — 杨 (yang) — 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 Yang are linked at the foot of this page.

Chinese surname 杨 — from the old state of Yang and the poplar tree it names. "Yeung" in Cantonese: carried worldwide on the great monsoon years of emigration. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 杨 — is in the section above.