Thousands of Wong numbers
Posted on June 13, 2007
Filed Under Asides, Outside Ireland, bureaucracy, culture, family, funny, interweb, society, the future | Leave a Comment
China runs out of surnames from The Register.
China has been forced to mull the possibility of allowing double-barrelled surnames – a break with the ancient tradition that citizens adopt one of a hundred single character surnames…
…In fact, other less common surnames bring the official total of permitted surnames to 161, but this doesn’t do much to offset the fact that there are now 93 million Wangs in China – closely followed by 92 million Lis – something which is causing the authorities a bit of a problem.
Best comment was by Simon Holt who wrote: “Looking through the Beijing phone-book must give thousands of Wong numbers“. Well, it was a new one to me!
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