Man-Yuk
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Meaning
graceful jade (曼玉); famously borne by actress Maggie Cheung (張曼玉), first Asian winner of the Cannes Best Actress award (Clean, 2004)
The story
Maggie Cheung has spent a career being introduced twice, and the second introduction is the one this page cares about: Cheung Man-yuk, the Cantonese given name that stayed in her professional billing beside the English one. In 1992 she became the first Chinese performer to win Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival, for Center Stage. Her international breakthrough came with Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love in 2000, and in 2004 she won Best Actress at Cannes for Clean, the first Asian actress to win that honor. The collection records her name's reading as graceful jade, and her career has been a fair advertisement for it. In American birth records Man-Yuk is essentially absent, which describes American records, not Cantonese families. Two names, two audiences, one performer who never traded either half away.
How popular is Man-Yuk around the world?
Man-Yuk does not appear in US Social Security baby-name records, which list only names given to at least five babies in a year. There is no popularity curve to chart: a genuinely rare pick.
United States
under 5 a year
Man-Yuk does not appear in US Social Security baby-name records, which list only names given to at least five babies in a year. There is no popularity curve to chart: a genuinely rare pick.
Births with a Social Security record. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration
Not on the record in Spain, Mexico City, Argentina, Puerto Rico, England and Wales, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland and Poland: those registries withhold small counts, so rare uses may sit below their floors.
Not on the Chile record: nametree keeps spellings that reached 5 registrations in some year, so rarer uses are not shown. Not on the Montevideo record for 1940 to 2011: that registry withholds nothing, so this spelling was not given there in those years. Not on the France record: nametree keeps spellings that reached 20 births in some year, so rarer uses are not shown. Not on the South Australia record for 1944 to 2017: that registry withholds nothing, so this spelling was not given there in those years. Not on the Austria record for 1984 to 2025: Statistik Austria publishes every first name down to a single birth, so this name was not given there in those years (before 2010 the record covers babies with Austrian citizenship only). Not on Norway’s list: Statistics Norway lists only first names carried by 200 or more living people, so rarer names are not shown.
Keep exploring
The Man-Yuk deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Man-Yuk truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Man-Yuk fits with your family’s names and surname.
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