Tong

Tong or Tonge may refer to:

Chinese

People

Tong (surname)

Tong is a Chinese surname. Tong as transcribed in English however represents of a number of different Chinese surnames.

There were 8,589 Tongs in the United States during the year 2000 census, making it the 3,075th surname overall and the 121st surname among Asian and Pacific Islanders.

Tong was also listed among the 200-most-common Chinese surnames in a 2010 survey of the Registered Persons Database of Canadian health card recipients in the province of Ontario. Tong may be the romanisation of the very common surname Zhang (張), as well as others such as Deng (鄧), Zhuang (莊), Teng (滕), and a number of Tongs (童, 同 and 佟).

Origin of some common Tongs (張, 莊, 滕, 鄧)

Tong is a Gan romanization of the Chinese surnames Zhang (trad. 張, simp. 张) and Zhuang (trad. 莊, simp. 庄).

Tong is also the Cantonese romanization of the surname Teng (滕), Deng (鄧).

同 the Tong

During the Shang Dynasty period, Lord Zi (子) founded the state of Tong (同国) in Shaanxi of China, later the Zi (子) family used the surname Tong (同, Tóng). The Tong surname may also have originated as a surname given to public officers during the middle Zhou Dynasty.

Tong (organization)

In Chinese culture, the word tong means "hall" or "gathering place". In North America, a tong (Chinese: 堂; pinyin: táng; Cantonese Yale: tong; literally: "hall") is a type of organization found among Chinese living in the United States and Canada. These organizations are described as secret societies or sworn brotherhoods and are often tied to criminal activity. Today in most American Chinatowns, if one can read Chinese, one can find clearly marked tong halls, many of which have had affiliations with Chinese crime gangs, especially in the 1990s.

Today tongs are, for the most part, members of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations, which are pro-Kuomintang traditional groups. Today these associations provide essential services for Chinatown communities such as immigrant counseling, Chinese schools, and English classes for adults, among countless others. Tongs follow the pattern of secret societies common to southern China and many are connected to a secret society called the Tiandihui, which follows this pattern. Other groups worldwide that follow this pattern and are connected with the Tiandihui are known as hui, hongmen, and triads.