Imagine a place where nearly 70% of the residents share the same last name. Well, Kaohsiung’s Neihu district is just that place, with most of the residents there surnamed Liu. And that’s not the only town in Taiwan like that.
Ministry of Interior data shows that Taiwan has 149 towns and villages where over half of the residents share the same last name. That’s out of 7,761 districts in Taiwan. In Yunlin’s Sihhu township, 65% of the people are surnamed Lin.
It’s not unusual to have the same last name as one’s neighbor, because 53 percent of people have one of Taiwan’s ten most common last names. The surname Chen is the most common, followed by Lin, Huang, Chang, Lee, Wang, Wu, Liu, Tsai and Yang.
Official data show that people with the last name Kuo (also spelled “Guo and Gou”), have the most real estate, as 28% of them own property. This may not come as a surprise, since one of the most famous people in Taiwan with that surname, Foxconn founder and CEO Terry Guo, is also the country’s most famous tycoon.