Nam

Korean: there is only one Chinese character for the surname Nam, meaning ‘south’. As many as fifty-seven Nam clans are mentioned in the records, but of these only four can be positively documented. The founding ancestor of the Nam clans was a man named Kim Ch'ung. He was an emissary from Tang, China, on his way to Japan when a southerly storm blew his ship northward and forced it aground in Shilla, Korea. The Shilla king Kyŏngdŏk (742–765), noting that he had come from the south, renamed the emissary Nam in 755.