← Fame through time1800-1899
The 19th century
Whose names filled the books of the 19th century - 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 19th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Zhu Xi870 - 2
Li Hongzhang149 - 3
Zhang Zhidong86 - 4
Zuo Zongtang43 - 5
Ban Gu40 - 6
Ge Hong40 - 7Chen Shou14
- 8
Mao Zedong12 - 9
Lu Xun11
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 19th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Ludwig van Beethoven21 decades - 2
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky10 decades - 3
Frédéric Chopin16 decades - 4
Richard Wagner19 decades - 5
Franz Schubert22 decades - 6
Gustav Mahler13 decades - 7
Giuseppe Verdi18 decades - 8
Johannes Brahms17 decades - 9
Franz Liszt19 decades - 10
Claude Debussy12 decades - 11
Antonín Dvořák0 decades - 12
Giacomo Puccini15 decades - 13
Felix Mendelssohn18 decades - 14
Robert Schumann19 decades - 15
Richard Strauss13 decades - 16
Niccolò Paganini18 decades - 17
Hector Berlioz19 decades - 18
Gioachino Rossini20 decades - 19
Johann Strauss II16 decades - 20
Edvard Grieg12 decades - 21
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov9 decades - 22
Modest Mussorgsky11 decades - 23
Camille Saint-Saëns15 decades - 24
Georges Bizet15 decades - 25
Edward Elgar13 decades - 26
Clara Schumann18 decades - 27
Alexander Borodin8 decades - 28
Anton Bruckner14 decades - 29
Mikhail Glinka12 decades - 30
Bedřich Smetana0 decades - 31
Jenny Lind18 decades - 32
Jacques Offenbach16 decades - 33
Gabriel Fauré14 decades - 34
Carl Maria von Weber21 decades - 35
Vincenzo Bellini22 decades - 36
Adolphe Sax13 decades - 37
Gaetano Donizetti19 decades - 38
Johann Strauss Inot measured- - 39
Charles Gounod17 decades - 40
John Philip Sousa13 decades - 41
Pietro Mascagni13 decades - 42
Leoš Janáček0 decades - 43
Anton Rubinstein15 decades - 44
Hortense de Beauharnais20 decades - 45
Isaac Albéniz12 decades - 46
Jules Massenet14 decades - 47
César Franck15 decades - 48
Mily Balakirev9 decades - 49
Ignacy Jan Paderewski0 decades - 50
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff14 decades - 51
Fanny Mendelssohn10 decades - 52
Stephen Foster18 decades - 53
Arthur Sullivan16 decades - 54
Léo Delibes16 decades - 55
Emma, Lady Hamilton1 decades - 56
Max Bruch17 decades - 57
Ruggero Leoncavallo13 decades
- 58
Giacomo Meyerbeer15 decades - 59
Nellie Melba10 decades - 60
Carl Czerny15 decades - 61
Cosima Wagner13 decades - 62
César Cui9 decades - 63
Francisco Tárreganot measured- - 64
Solomon Northup3 decades - 65
Maria Theresa of Naples and Sicilynot measured- - 66
Johann Nepomuk Hummel8 decades - 67
Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart2 decades - 68
Adolphe Adam19 decades - 69
Hans von Bülow17 decades - 70
Pablo de Sarasate11 decades - 71
Frederick Delius8 decades - 72
Abdülaziznot measured- - 73
Charles-Valentin Alkan0 decades - 74
Hugo Wolf13 decades - 75
Fanny Crosby4 decades - 76
Nikolai Rubinstein10 decades - 77
Ethel Smyth11 decades - 78
Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev9 decades - 79
Eugène Ysaÿe0 decades - 80
Alexander Dargomyzhsky5 decades - 81
Amilcare Ponchielli15 decades - 82
Franz von Suppé0 decades - 83
Charles-Marie Widor8 decades - 84
Joseph Joachim19 decades - 85
Adelina Patti16 decades - 86
Pauline Viardot18 decades - 87
Louis Spohr21 decades - 88
Tyagaraja6 decades - 89
Henryk Wieniawski0 decades - 90
Josef Strauss0 decades - 91
Daniel Auber0 decades - 92
Carlos Manuel de Céspedes del Castillonot measured- - 93
Édouard Lalo1 decades - 94
Vincent d'Indy14 decades - 95
Karl Mozart0 decades - 96
Fernando Sor11 decades - 97
Cécile Chaminade1 decades - 98
Franz Xaver Gruber5 decades - 99
Anatoly Lyadov1 decades - 100
Emmanuel Chabrier14 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.