e-Onomastics: The Man Who Tried to Become a Purple Emperor: Inside China's Wildest Renaming Saga

Thursday, August 27, 2026

The Man Who Tried to Become a Purple Emperor: Inside China's Wildest Renaming Saga

In January 2025, a young man in China walked out of a police station with a new legal name: 朱雀玄武敕令 - roughly, "Edict of the Vermilion Bird and Black Tortoise." It was already his second self-reinvention in eight months. It would not be his last attempt. Over the next year, he'd file eleven name-change applications, try to become "Purple Emperor of the Heavens," attempt a 48-character name, and - in a twist that felt almost too on-the-nose - try to rename himself after George Washington.

By the time Chinese police finally drew a hard line, the story had become a genuine viral moment: equal parts internet comedy, legal case study, and uncomfortable mirror held up to a bureaucracy built for a world where nobody wanted to be a mythological deity.

From Zhu Yunfei to the Vermilion Bird

The man's original name was ordinary: 朱云飞 (Zhu Yunfei), born in 2001. He didn't like it. In May 2024 he successfully changed it to 朱雀玄武 (Zhu Que Xuan Wu) — "Vermilion Bird, Black Tortoise," two of the four mythical guardian beasts of Chinese cosmology (Tencent News, April 2025). That should have been dramatic enough for most people. It wasn't enough for him. In January 2025 he escalated to 朱雀玄武敕令 - appending 敕令 ("edict" or "imperial decree"), the kind of phrase you'd expect stamped on a Taoist talisman, not a Chinese national ID card (The Beijing News, April 2025).

Then, on April 16, 2025, he applied to become 周天紫薇大帝 - "Purple Emperor of the Heavens" (a real deity in Chinese folk religion, associated with the North Star). Police rejected it. Eleven days later, undeterred, he submitted an application for a 48-character name. That, too, was denied (The Beijing News). By the time reporters caught up with the story, he'd racked up eleven name-change applications in thirteen months (Tencent News, July 2025) - including, according to later reporting, an attempt to become "周乔治华盛顿" - "Zhou George Washington" (Tencent News, May 2025).

The Internet Reacts

Naturally, this did not stay quiet. Screenshots of his ID card - genuinely printed with "朱雀玄武敕令" - circulated widely online. Some commenters joked it looked like someone who'd played too much Honor of Kings; others said it read like a cultivation novel (修仙小说) come to life, joking he'd "ascended in place" (Tencent News, April 2025).

It's easy to see why it landed. China's xianxia and cultivation-fantasy genres - full of immortals, celestial titles, and mystical edicts - are enormously popular, and here was someone seemingly trying to live the genre through the driest possible bureaucratic channel: a household registration office.

The Legal Question Nobody Had Fully Answered

Here's what makes this more than a meme: China's Civil Code genuinely does protect the right to change your name. Article 1012 of the Civil Code states that natural persons enjoy the right to name themselves - to decide, use, change, or license the use of their own name - with one condition: it must not violate 公序良俗 (public order and good morals) (Tencent News). Article 1015 adds that, with a few exceptions, citizens should generally take their father's or mother's surname - meaning you can't just invent a new surname on a whim (Tencent News).

So which was it - a citizen exercising a genuine legal right, or someone abusing it? Legal commentators leaned toward the latter. Beijing lawyer Huang Xiaoyu noted that Chinese name-related law is scattered across multiple statutes - the Civil Code, the Resident ID Card Law, the National Common Language and Script Law, and household-registration regulations - and that none of them grant an unlimited right to rename yourself as often or as fancifully as you like (The Beijing News).

Senior partner Ma Lihong was more direct: she argued his pattern - eleven applications in thirteen months, several for overtly bizarre names - met the legal definition of "abuse of rights" (滥用权利) under Article 132 of the Civil Code, which bars exercising a civil right in a way that damages state or public interest. In her reading, the repeated applications wasted administrative resources, undermined the seriousness of the household-registration system, and risked a copycat effect (Tencent News, July 2025). Commentary from The Paper (澎湃新闻) and The Beijing News took a similar line: this had stopped being about personal identity and become, in effect, a stunt performed through the vehicle of a real legal right - even though the man himself insisted, when interviewed, that he wasn't doing it for attention, just out of personal "hobby" (爱好) (The Beijing News).

Why Police Said No

Police ultimately rejected his later applications on public-order-and-morals grounds, and the case became a small case study in how much discretion Chinese household-registration officers actually hold. As one write-up summarized the reasoning: a citizen genuinely has the right to a name, but that right has boundaries — it can't be used to evade legal or financial obligations, it can't include vulgar or misleading content, and it can't be exercised so repetitively that it disrupts registration order (Sohu/163 legal explainer, via Tencent News).

Coverage also drew a cross-strait comparison to Taiwan's 2021 "salmon chaos" (鮭魚之亂), when hundreds of people legally changed their names to include "鮭魚" (salmon) to claim a sushi restaurant's promotional freebie - a much lighter-hearted precedent for mass, whimsical legal renaming in a Chinese-speaking society (Tencent News).

The Bigger Picture: A Law That Was Never Actually Finished

The case landed at an oddly fitting moment, because China still doesn't have a dedicated, fully enacted naming law. Back in 2007, the Ministry of Public Security drafted a standalone "Regulations on Name Registration" (姓名登记条例，初稿) - it would have set given names at 2–6 characters, banned invented characters, foreign scripts, and Pinyin letters in legal names, and, notably, allowed children to combine both parents' surnames into new "double surnames." It was circulated to police bureaus nationwide for training purposes - and then quietly never formally issued (Oriental Lawyers Network; Peking University Law School commentary).

Nearly two decades later, name changes in China are still governed by that same scattered patchwork of Civil Code articles and household-registration rules the draft was meant to replace - which is exactly the ambiguity this case exposed. Local enforcement varies too: a Weinan city police Q&A in March 2025 clarified there's no formal legal cap on the number of times someone can change their name, even though in practice repeated or poorly justified requests get turned down (Sina Finance).

The Takeaway

Strip away the mythological flourish and the "Purple Emperor" comedy, and this is really a story about the gap between a right written broadly on paper (you may change your name) and a right applied narrowly in practice (but not like that, and not that often). China's Civil Code gave one young man a real legal lever to reinvent himself as often as he liked — and a household registration officer, backstopped by "public order and good morals," decided eleven times in thirteen months was exactly ten times too many.

Somewhere out there, a Chinese national ID card still reads 朱雀玄武敕令 - a permanent, government-laminated reminder that even in a system this bureaucratic, myth occasionally slips through the cracks. Just not George Washington.

Sources:

e-Onomastics

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