During the 2026 Spring Festival travel season, several Chinese media outlets reported on a public surname-culture initiative titled “话百家姓，过中国年” - literally, “Talk about the Hundred Surnames, Celebrate Chinese New Year.” The campaign used one of the most familiar elements of Chinese anthroponymy - the family name - as a way to connect New Year travel, family memory, regional origin, and cultural identity.
The initiative was especially visible in transport spaces: railway stations, ports, and flights. This setting was symbolically important. The Spring Festival travel period is one of the largest annual movements of people in China, and the campaign placed surnames directly in the context of return, mobility, and family reunion. At Xiamen railway station, for example, a special surname-rubbing experience area was set up. Travellers could look for their surname, make a rubbing or printed surname postcard, and receive surname-themed New Year items such as lucky bags, postcards, and Spring Festival couplets. One Taiwanese participant, Xie Ruifeng from Kaohsiung, used the occasion to speak about his ancestral connection to Nan’an, Quanzhou, Fujian, and about the historical memory attached to the surname Xie.
The same campaign appeared in other railway settings. At Fuzhou South Station, the event combined surname culture with traditional New Year practices. Travellers could take part in Hundred Surnames rubbing, calligraphy, lantern riddles, and the making or receiving of surname-themed red envelopes. The station reportedly distributed 1,000 Hundred Surnames themed red envelopes, and an exhibition panel on the oracle-bone origins of surname characters introduced visitors to the graphic and historical development of Chinese surnames.
In Guangzhou South Station, the campaign took a more calligraphic form. On 6 February 2026, a “Talk about Hundred Surnames, Celebrate Chinese New Year” activity was held in the waiting hall, where 23 calligraphers wrote New Year blessings, Spring Festival couplets, and the character 福 for travellers. The event was organized by the literary and art federation of China Railway Guangzhou Group and took place during a period when Guangzhou South Station expected nearly 297,000 passengers on that day.
The campaign also moved into the air. Xiamen Airlines turned some flights into surname-culture themed spaces, including routes from Xiamen to Taipei, Beijing, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. Cabin decorations, red envelopes, bookmarks, and surname-themed interactions transformed the aircraft into a temporary site of onomastic heritage promotion. A similar example was reported on cross-Strait flights, where passengers exchanged blessings based on their surnames: for instance, “My surname is Huang, I wish everyone fei huang teng da,” using the auspicious idiom associated with success; or “My surname is Zheng, I wish everyone a bright future.”
From an onomastic point of view, the campaign is noteworthy because it did not present surnames merely as decorative labels. It turned them into public cultural objects: people searched for them, printed them, displayed them, discussed their origins, and connected them with migration stories. The surname Xie, for instance, was linked in reports to ancestral memory and historical figures; the surname Chen appeared in stories of cross-Strait encounters; and common surnames became the basis for personalized greetings, calligraphy, and New Year gifts.
At the same time, the initiative clearly had a broader cultural and political framing. Many reports emphasized shared roots, family origin, cross-Strait kinship, and Chinese cultural identity, especially in relation to Taiwan. For researchers of names, this makes the campaign an important example of how anthroponymy can enter public culture: surnames become tools of heritage-making, emotional communication, identity-building, and symbolic connection across regions.
In this sense, “话百家姓，过中国年” was more than a festive activity. It was a public onomastic campaign in which surnames were placed at the intersection of mobility, memory, genealogy, and cultural belonging. For contemporary name studies, it offers a concrete example of how personal names — especially family names — can be mobilized as living cultural heritage in everyday public space.
