Tong is a Chinese surname. Tong as transcribed in English however represents of a number of different Chinese surnames.
There were 8,589 Tongs in the United States during the year 2000 census, making it the 3,075th surname overall and the 121st surname among Asian and Pacific Islanders.[1]
Tong was also listed among the 200-most-common Chinese surnames in a 2010 survey of the Registered Persons Database of Canadian health card recipients in the province of Ontario.[2] Tong may be the romanisation of the very common surname Zhang (張), as well as others such as Deng (鄧), Zhuang (莊), Teng (滕), and a number of Tongs (童, 同 and 佟).
During the Shang dynasty period, Lord Zi (子) founded the state of Tong (同国) in Shaanxi of China, later the Zi (子) family used the surname Tong (同, Tóng).[citation needed] The Tong surname may also have originated as a surname given to public officers during the middle Zhou dynasty.
Some Tong families are said to be descendants of Sima Qian. Sima Qian was a Han dynasty historian who wrote the Records of the Grand Historian. According to this story, when Sima Qian was put in prison by the Emperor, his children fled. His two sons decided to change their name, each using one character of the Sima surname (司马). The Si (司) was modified to Tong (同) by the addition of a stroke, while Ma (馬) was modified to Feng (馮). There remains a taboo that the two families should not intermarry.[3]
This page lists people with the surnameTong. If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name(s) to the link.