Chinese surname · rank 292
朴
朴 is read as piáo.
piáo
Simplified 朴 · Traditional 樸
simple, unadorned; sincere; a tree
Wood
Time: Eastern Han Ba-commandery Banjun Man layer, Five Dynasties Liaodong Goryeo/Korean layer, early Silla founder tradition, later Manchu transliteration layer, and modern Korean and northeast-China distribution layer; Eastern Han textual layer, 25-220 CE
Place: Ba commandery and Banjun Man/Tujia-related southern context; Liaodong and Goryeo/Korean northern context; Korean peninsula Silla and later bon-gwan contexts; northeast China Korean communities; Manchu Piaogiya/related transliteration context; Hebei local Pu/Piao village-name contexts noted in modern surname discussions
Origin note
Piao or Pu is a surname with several distinct layers. For Chinese surname history, 23mofang gives a southern layer from the Eastern Han Ba-commandery Banjun Man, ancestors of later Tujia-related groups, whose chief surnames included Pu. It also gives a northern layer from Liaodong Goryeo/Korean people in the Five Dynasties period, which explains why many northern and especially northeast-China Pu/Piao families are tied to Korean ancestry. A separate Korean tradition treats Park/Pak/Bak as one of Korea's largest surnames, with many bon-gwan lineages and a Silla founder tradition around Hyeokgeose. The character's surname reading is not simple: Mandarin materials record pio and p, while modern reporting around Korean names often uses p; the page uses the working pinyin piao for this row but notes the variants. Manchu transliteration and changed-surname layers also exist, so the entry does not merge every Pu/Piao family into one origin.
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