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[renlh]

Can someone please tell me what this totem says?

[Kamille]

It's the Li family totem. It claims that the Li family's most remote ancestor is Gao Yao (a historical figure who lived around 4000 years ago and whose story is full of legends).

It consists of 3 parts : the first (top left) is a tree 木, standing for the black bird that is said to be Gao Yao's father ; the second (bottom left) is a child 子, representing the black bird's egg, that Gao Yao's mother ate before getting pregnant ; finally the third part (right) is a tiger 虎, representing a white tiger that also has something to do with Gao Yao's own ancestry but I don't quite get that bit (this white tiger might actually be a person's name 白虎少昊 but in these legends a lot of god-like people are represented as animals and google doesn't provide much information about that bit).

Once put all together, these three parts make this character (李*虎) which I suppose is the original form of 李, the character for the Li family. The only difference is that the 虎 part is not there anymore in modern and even traditional script. It even seems to have disappeared before that: I just went to take a look at older scripts and even bronze characters were written just as they are now : 李. 

Also I don't know when that legend about the black bird and the white tiger originated. Plus it's always a mystery to me just how Chinese people can go back that far away in time to find who was their ancestor. I recently read in the newspapers that a girl whose family name is 孔 (same as Confucius) was abducted somewhere around Taipei some days ago. Now the fact that she was abducted is not my point here: the article insisted that she was Confucius's 77th generation and I would really like to know how they can go back that far away in time and still be able to tell you exatly how many generations separate the person from their ancestor. Just the fact that they are able to trace such a remote ancestor always ices me. In Europe you'd be lucky to just be able to go 300 years back in time. I mean I get that there's a limited amount of surnames in China but seriously? Didn't Confucius have any uncle on his father's side? I mean that's still the "same blood" (after 2500 years, yeah, definitely  ) but that's not Confucius's offspring if it's his uncle's.

 

May I ask how you ran into this picture, by the way?

[renlh]

Thank you SOOOOOO much. I've been doing some digging into my family history and I came across the concept of family totems and I was lucky enough to find mine on this forum 

[Lu]

Just the fact that they are able to trace such a remote ancestor always ices me. In Europe you'd be lucky to just be able to go 300 years back in time.

Depends very much on your family. Nobility can often trace themselves back a lot longer than that (in fact, I read somewhere that that is actually the main distinguishing factor of nobility: that they can trace their ancestors back further than a generation or four). Makes sense, really: the more money there is in a family, the more important to know who is and isn't entitled to inherit some of it.

 

And in China, Confucius' family is one of the cases where it really matters. Generations of rulers have needed a descendant of Confucius to make offerings at the relevant holidays, so they had to keep track.

 

In addition, many families, if they have the money and the energy to keep it up, have an ancestral shrine, so there is some record. And for anyone who doesn't have that, I think many surnames have a story of origin, so even if you don't know who exactly was your ancestor of 200-300 years ago, you still know that since you're a 施, you're descended from the 方 family who fled south by the end of the so-and-so dynasty.