AFTER a thousand years, the ridicule and barking provoked by the mention of their surname finally proved too much for families from a village in central China. They won permission this month to change their name legally from Gou, a word that means “humble” but is pronounced the same as “dog”.

“Some people just bark at me when they see me,” a villager from Tangzhuang township in central Henan province said.

Not any more. The villagers have reversed a decision imposed on them by a 10th-century emperor and have recovered their ancient family name of Jing, which means “respect”. Their centuries of shame began with an ancestor who was a minister to Emperor Shi Jingtang in the chaotic Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period and shared his master’s name — Jing. To curry favour, Minister Jing changed his surname to one virtually unused in China. But his heirs found that their lives had gone to the dogs.

Villager Jing Hulin, 60, had been known all his life as Gou Hulin. He said: “Gou sounds terrible. People always make fun of us, calling us dog. Children are afraid to go to school because they’ll be laughed at. And, anyway, our ancestor’s name was Jing and we wanted to go back to that.”

A total of 48 members of 13 families will no longer be mocked for carrying the name Gou. Local police said that they agreed to make the name change only after many painstaking hours of research through historical documents.

Guo Junchao, the chief of the county police in Tangzhuang, said: “We had never received such a request before, so it made for a huge amount of work.”

The obscure emperor who ruled for a mere decade had indeed, it seemed, been behind centuries of mockery for the Gou families. “This surname brought unnecessary troubles and unreasonable discrimination,” said police chief Guo, whose own name sounds similar in English but is quite different in Chinese. “When they would ask for a receipt, people often wrote their name as ‘dog’. There are just too many examples.” “Dog” is a bitter insult in China. Most famously it was used during the Cultural Revolution, when “capitalist running dog” was one of the worst terms of abuse.

The word appears in numerous popular phrases, among the commonest being “a dog trying to catch mice”, meaning a busybody and “crowds of wolves and dogs”, meaning a pack of scoundrels.

Police chief Guo defended his decision against scholars who disapproved of the name change — an unusual move in a society where tradition is to revere ancestors and to ensure the transmission of the family name. He said: “I think these people don’t understand the feelings of the villagers. They would know better if their name was Gou.”

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