Kong Tao is a 24-year-old sales assistant from a village
of east China, living in Beijing. But popular belief has it that she is a
descendant of Confucius, the Great Sage.
Miss Kong will rely on her father to take the
DNA test |
Now Miss Kong, with three million other people worldwide, may be able to find
out whether her claim to fame is well-merited, or whether she can return to
obscurity.
The Chinese Academy of Science has said it is willing to offer DNA tests to
anyone claiming Confucius as an ancestor. Since Confucius's proper name was Kong
Zi, and since all of the world's three million Kongs are popularly supposed to
be descended from the great man, that could prove to be a big job.
"It is more than 2,000 years since the time of Kong Zi and there may yet be a
lot of difficulty and confusion in finding true descendants," said Deng Yajun,
of the academy's Genomics Institute.
"But as we know, testing the Y chromosome [found only in males] is the most
accurate test and usually in Chinese family trees only males were named and
followed in their family genealogies."
Confucius was born in 551BC and his philosophy of patriarchal and
hierarchical benevolence has been a guiding force in Chinese history for most of
the centuries since.
Many Kongs remain in and around Qufu but others have scattered across China
and the world. Official estimates put the number at 2.5 million on the Chinese
mainland, 100,000 in Korea and others in Singapore, Malaysia and America. Among
them are at least one ambassador, a Taiwanese rap star and a number of British
public schoolboys.
The project will compile a DNA database matched against a group of families
thought to have a complete genealogical record going back through the millennia
to their common antecedent.
The academy said the test would take a day and would cost ¡ê30 to ¡ê40.
At her bicycle shop, Miss Kong said she would rely on her father to take the
test. She comes from Jiangsu province, immediately south of Qufu, where all the
inhabitants are named Kong.
"I have no idea whether there is any connection with Confucius at all," she
said. "But it would be nice to know."