Generation poems were usually composed by a committee of family elders whenever a new lineage was established through geographical emigration or social elevation.
During the Ming dynasty, Emperor Jianwen respected Confucius and Mencius so much that he honored their families with generation poems.
Besides the Han majority, the Muslim Hui Chinese people[note 1] have also widely employed generation names, which they call lunzi paibie;[note 2] for instance, in the Na family, the five most recent generations used the characters Wan, Yu, Zhang, Dian, and Hong.
[8] The Yao people of Guangdong has also adopted the Chinese name system, albeit with extensions known as "sub-family-names" to indicate branches.
Some groups have more recently (circa Song Dynasty) adopted the generation name system with little modification.
The affiliation character Miào (妙 'profound, marvelous') usually was used by women, relating them to Guanyin, as Miàoshàn (妙善) was her name at birth.
In the same way, taking the monastic vows meant the break with the family lineage, which was shown by application of the Buddhist surname Shì (釋, Thích in Vietnam) in one's Dharma name, the first character of Gautama Buddha's title in Chinese: Shìjiāmóuní (釋迦牟尼, 'Śākyamuni', lit.