Where the Chen name comes from

Chen is a surname from Chinese, carried into English from the Mandarin name written 陳 or 陈. The name descends from the legendary sage king Emperor Shun, from around 2200 BC, through the surname Gui. When King Wu of Zhou founded the Zhou dynasty around 1046 BC, he granted land to his son-in-law Gui Man, a descendant of Shun, who founded the State of Chen in what is now Huaiyang County in Henan Province. Chu absorbed that state in 479 BC and made it its capital, and the people of Chen took the name of their former state as their surname.

The name stands tenth in the Hundred Family Surnames poem, in the verse Féng Chén Chǔ Wèi. The same name is spelled Chan in Cantonese, Tan in Southern Min speech such as Hokkien, Chin in Hakka, and Trần in Vietnam.