Da Qing or Daqing

[foxghost]

Original ask here

hi, i found your posts on the guardian characters' names (thank you for those, btw<3) and it got me wondering. with daqing, for example, is it his first name and does he just.. not have a last name? i've seen some people write it as da qing (last name, first name, i'm assuming?), and the same with the crow tribe leader lady. also, the villain, zhu jiu?? i've never seen anyone write zhuhong instead of zhu hong though... sorry for bothering you, hope you're having a great day/evening!!

YOU ARE NEVER BOTHERING ME BY ASKING ME ABOUT THE THING I LOVE and you’re very welcome, I’m glad people find those useful. <3

*coughs*

Da Qing, or Daqing? Well this is complicated. The answer is both I am so sorry.

Officially, it’s Da Qing. It’s on his plaque at the S.I.D., drama!verse. In drama!verse, Da Qing spends more time in human form than cat form.

But see:

• In novel!verse he is more cat than human, and spends most of his time being a cat. Zhao Yunlan didn’t even know his cat could transform until more than halfway through the book.
  
• 大 / Da is not a proper last name; it‘s not listed in the 百家姓/Hundred Family Names (contains more than 100 names)
  
• 大 literally means big or great and it is the antonym of 小/xiao/little. You can use it as a prefix the same way you use xiao
  
• 大慶 / Daqing is a cat’s name that means “great celebration.” Which is probably what the gods were doing as they handed the cat to Kunlun and he stopped pissing on Fuxi’s tail and being a general menace. (Bonus: his friend cat-with-nine-lives added in the drama is named 大吉, “great luck.” It’s a relatively common thing to name a cat.)
  
• Novel!verse Daqing existed before humans and their usage of last names, and everyone from that time period had no last names: Kunlun, Nuwa, Shennong — no spaces.
  

So that’s why my tag for him is #daqing or #大慶 because I’m a stickler for dumb details.

But in drama-sci-fi world, humans and aliens existed (separately) first, Yashou mutated after the arrival of aliens, and there were no gods. So, last names for everybody. We can pretend every “master of the mountains in the great wilderness” of every generation is named after Kunlun mountain itself, so he gets no last name.

As for Zhu Hong: 祝 is a traditional last name listed in Hundred Family Names and she was a young Yao novel!verse, presumably born after people started getting last names, so it makes sense that her name is always written Zhu Hong.