The 5,000-year-old Chinese civilization has endowed Chinese culture with profound heritage and historical inheritance. Among them, the most emblematic of this characteristic is the surname. Surnames have also undergone quite complex development and evolution in China, from the earliest tribal totem symbols, derived from surnames, and then experienced the tianzi surname in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, as well as the rapid development of surnames under the sub-feudal system, and then later integrated into the surnames of various ethnic minorities. Today, there are conservatively estimated 5,662 surnames in China.
Among them, there are also some extremely special surnames, such as the surname "Xu Shi", which many people look a little strange at first glance. This Chinese surname was born in Sri Lanka on the other side of the ocean, and during the Ming Dynasty, sri Lanka had a fallen prince who came to China, and later settled in the Quanzhou area of Fujian Province, multiplied, and married a Chinese woman. After several generations of development, the descendants of the prince changed their foreign surname to "Xu Shi".
In fact, not only "Xu Shi" was changed according to foreign surnames, but also a foreign crown prince in The Gansu region of China, who, like Sri Lankan princes, not only took root in China, but also changed their surnames to Chinese surnames. So, who is this foreign crown prince?
They are the Iranians who moved into our country more than 2,000 years ago. At that time, the Iranian region was still a slave country called the Sabbath Empire, and China was in the heyday of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty. After Zhang Qian's mission to the Western Regions, the East and the West began to have trade exchanges, and the Rest Empire, as the busiest transit point on the trade road, naturally did not hear the story of the strong Han Dynasty.
Because the Han Dynasty was already a feudal society, it was much more advanced and richer than the slavery system of the Sabbath Empire. At that time, many residents of the Sabbath Empire were full of yearning for the Han Dynasty after hearing about it, so they came to China in the name of trade, and finally even married and had children with Chinese women, and settled in China forever.
At that time, the merchants of these Sabbath Empires basically lived in this part of Gansu, after all, the climate in this area was also the most similar to that of Iran. After they came to Gansu, they did not rush to change their Chinese surnames, and it was not until later that the princes of the Sabbath Empire also came to Gansu, and they collectively changed their surnames.
Since the Sabbath Empire was also called the Parthian Empire, they collectively changed their surname to Ampatia to commemorate their homeland. But the name was still a Western name, and then shortened to the current An surname. And the prince of the Sabbath Kingdom, who took the lead in changing the name of his people, also changed his name to Anqing.
Later, more than 2,000 years of development, a large number of Iranian descendants with the surname An intermarried and integrated with the Chinese people, and also began to move out of Gansu and go all over the country. Even in the south of our country, there are people with the surname an. Their growth has added an ancient member to the Chinese surname.
For more than 2,000 years, they have not only been worshipping the prince anqing of the Sabbath Empire as the ancestor of the surname, but there are still some nuances in appearance from the Han people. For example, their skin is relatively white, their facial features are more three-dimensional, and these typical Iranian characteristics have not disappeared despite intermarriage with Han Chinese for many generations.
Dear readers, if you have friends with the surname An around you who meet the above characteristics, there is a good chance that you will be a descendant of the Iranian Sabbath Empire. And the reason why Chinese surnames can be so large and full of stories is precisely because they are inclusive enough. Looking around the world, only Chinese surnames can make foreign surnames and local surnames coexist harmoniously.