← Fame through time1900-1909
The 1900s
Whose names filled the books of the 1900s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in Chinese books during the 1900s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Mao Zedong66 - 2
Lu Xun39 - 3
Lin Yutang21 - 4
Liu Shaoqi13 - 5
Soong Ching-ling12 - 6
Lin Biao7.5 - 7
Zhou Enlai7.1 - 8Gao Ming4.1
- 9
Deng Xiaoping3.5 - 10
Laozi2.9 - 11
Sun Yat-sen1.8 - 12
Zhu De1.7 - 13
Li Hongzhang0.78 - 14
Yuan Shikai0.77 - 15
Confucius0.58 - 16
Sima Qian0.52 - 17
Qu Yuan0.36 - 18
Zhuang Zhou0.31 - 19
Du Fu0.18 - 20
Guan Hanqing0.18 - 21
Yan Fu0.16 - 22
Cao Xueqin0.12 - 23
Li Bai0.12 - 24
Ouyang Xiu0.09 - 25
Bai Juyi0.09
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1900s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Winston Churchill13 decades - 2
Vladimir Lenin12 decades - 3
Mahatma Gandhi10 decades - 4
Marie Curie4 decades - 5
George V16 decades - 6
Grigori Rasputin11 decades - 7
Herbert Hoover11 decades - 8
Nicholas II of Russia14 decades - 9Sun Yat-sen12 decades
- 10
Calvin Coolidge11 decades - 11
Warren G. Harding11 decades - 12
Rudyard Kipling13 decades - 13
Frank Lloyd Wright12 decades - 14
Rosa Luxemburg13 decades - 15
Neville Chamberlain16 decades - 16
H. G. Wells16 decades - 17
Bertrand Russell13 decades - 18
Harry Houdini7 decades - 19
Marcel Proust12 decades - 20
Henri Matisse12 decades - 21
Sergei Rachmaninoffnot measured- - 22
Robert Frost13 decades - 23
W. B. Yeats12 decades - 24
G. K. Chesterton12 decades - 25
Beatrix Potter10 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.