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A Chinese Scholar Gave His Daughters Unreadable Names to Test Their Suitors. It Backfired.

Zhang Binglin (章太炎, 1869–1936) was one of the most formidable classical scholars of his era — a revolutionary, a linguist, a master of ancient Chinese texts, and a man with very specific ideas about who was qualified to marry his daughters.

His solution: give each daughter a name composed of characters so archaic and obscure that only a genuinely well-read person could identify them at sight. Any prospective suitor who could read the names had passed the minimum literacy test. Any suitor who could not — regardless of wealth, family, or social position — was, by Zhang's standard, disqualified before the conversation began.

His four daughters received the following names, using characters from the most remote reaches of classical Chinese script:

• 㸚 (lǐ) — a character from ancient bronze inscriptions, appearing almost nowhere in modern usage
• 叕 (zhuó) — meaning "to connect," used in pre-Qin texts, rarely reproduced in modern typefaces
• 㠭 (zhǎn) — an archaic mountain-related character, absent from most modern character tables
• 㗊 (jí) — a compound of four mouths (口), meaning "noise of many voices," found in ancient dictionaries but effectively invisible in modern life

The characters are real. They are findable in exhaustive classical character databases. Almost no educated adult in modern China can identify all four on sight.

What happened

The filter worked in one direction only: it screened out anyone who had not spent years in serious classical study. It did not, unfortunately, guarantee that anyone who had spent years in classical study would be otherwise suitable as a husband. It also screened out a substantial number of people who were, by any reasonable measure, excellent candidates — but who had simply not memorised obscure bronze-script characters as part of their education.

Matchmakers, who might otherwise have brought forward a range of possibilities, hesitated. Introducing a candidate to a family where the first interaction required reading four unknowable characters was professionally awkward. Several declined entirely.

Zhang Binglin's daughters were not permanently unmarried — they did eventually find spouses — but the naming strategy extended what should have been a straightforward social process into something more complicated and protracted than it needed to be.

The lesson: a name is not a test

Zhang Binglin treated his daughters' names as an instrument of selection — a filter designed to act on other people. This is an unusual and ultimately unsuccessful approach, but it illuminates something real about the social function of Chinese names.

Names do signal things. A name composed of classical poetic characters signals education and aesthetic sensibility. A name using five-element analysis signals that the family follows traditional naming practice. A name from Confucian virtue vocabulary signals a family with classical values. These signals are genuine — they communicate something about the parents and, over time, something about the child.

But a name that is designed primarily as a signal to others — rather than as a gift to its bearer — has its priorities reversed. Zhang Binglin's daughters carried names that were meant to filter suitors, not to serve the daughters themselves. The filter operated on everyone who encountered the names: teachers, doctors, government clerks, and eventually employers and colleagues, all of whom faced the same illegibility problem as the rejected suitors.

A name lives with the child, not with the people the name is meant to impress.

✨ Choose a name that serves the child, not just the parents' vision →

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