Zhao in Chinese: 赵

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

赵 breaks down as 赵 (zhào) — A light, swift runner; the imperial surname of the Song dynasty. The seal note we would put under it: Swift and royal.

Pinyin: zhào — 赵 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.

Yes. 赵 (zhào) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. Also of Ying blood, and also ancestor of the first emperor — the two houses shared a charioteer. Zaofu, who drove the Son of Heaven’s eight steeds, was granted the settlement of Zhao for his reins; his descendants took the town’s name, and one of them founded the great wall state of Zhao, and one of them, three centuries before, was the ancestor of Qin. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 赵 surname page — and that lineage is the reason a Western name can borrow the character for a surname at all.

赵 is built from 赵 — 赵 (zhào) — 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 Zhao are linked at the foot of this page.

Chinese surname 赵 — first on the Thousand-Family Names list for a thousand years, because the writer of that Song-dynasty primer was writing for his emperor, and emperors were surnamed Zhao. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 赵 — is in the section above.