BEIJING, June 16 -- Generally, a Chinese name should sound good and carry an auspicious connotation for it's believed a baby's name is connected with his or her destiny.

    Yao Xue and her husband Wang Xiao, in their late 20s, have just experienced some of the difficulties involved in finding a name.

    The couple, both graduates of a prestigious university, had a baby girl last October. After the first excitement, giving her a name became a priority for the whole family, including the four grandparents.

    Initial discussions, with the six adults offering their own ideas from their own knowledge and using dictionaries, ended without an agreement.

    Then Yao recalls once testing her name on a numerology Website that said her name was problematic based on the calculating of her bazi, or "eight characters of her birth."

    "You have to survive a lot of difficulties to succeed in middle age; you will often quarrel with your husband; you will not be in a good mood in your old age ..." the explanation reads.

    According to the "Book of Change," or the "I Ching," which describes the system of cosmology and philosophy that is intrinsic to ancient Chinese cultural beliefs, the eight characters are in four pairs denoting the time, date, month and year of a person's birth.

    Each pair is represented by one Heaven Stem and one Earth Branch, ancient measurements of time. And each character has its associated polarity - yin and yang, and the five elements - gold, wood, water, fire and earth.

    Yao is afraid that someday her daughter would do the same thing as she did - test her name on a numerology Website. "It would have a bad effect on her if the result was not desirable, " Yao says.

    So Yao went to a friend's father, an amateur "I Ching" enthusiast for help. Yao was told her baby lacked "fire" in her bazi. It's normally difficult for a person to have all five elements, but a name can make up for deficiencies.

    She took the suggestion of adding "fire" to her daughter's name. Yao and her husband enlarged the naming team to more than 20, including friends and relatives. There was still no agreement.

    Professor Wang Daliang, from China Youth University for Political Sciences and an expert on names, says that "increasingly young couples pin more hope on children's names, as they are single-child parents themselves, and their babies are mostly only-children."