Why Are There So Many People Named Park, Lee, and Kim In Korea?
If you ever thought there was a lot of Kims, Parks and Lees in Korea you would be right:
“If you throw a stone from a hill in Seoul, chances are fifty-fifty that it would hit a Kim, Lee or Park.” So goes a Korean joke showing how common the three surnames are.
A recent census has reaffirmed this _ one in every five Koreans living within the country has the family name of Kim, according to a recent population and housing survey by Statistics Korea.
The number of people with Kim as their surname totaled 10.69 million or 21.5 percent of the total population of 51.07 million.
Coming in second and third on the list of most common surnames are Lee or Yi (14.7 percent) and Park (8.4 percent).
Following the big-three were Choe or Choi (4.7 percent), Chung (4.3 percent), Kang (2.4 percent), Cho (2.1 percent), Yun or Yoon (2.1 percent), Chang (2.0 percent) and Lim or Im (1.7 percent). [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, which includes an interesting discussions about the origins of these three names.
The article is using bad logic to explain the numbers. Truth: only the elites were allowed to have family names as they were given by the king. Most people had no family names. Regular people just grabbed family names at will when the dynastic system began breaking down.
This is correct. Most Koreans had no last names until fairly recently during the Chosun Dynasty beginning in the 14th century. Only the aristocrats were allowed to adopt the last names that were sourced from the Chinese written characters that Koreans used as their writing system. Well into the Chosun Dynasty, people began to buy their aristocratic priviledges including registering their newly bought last names which brought them class recognition.