The character 里 (lǐ): inside

A Chinese hamlet among its paddy fields, seen from slightly above in full afternoon light: grey brick houses with dark tiled roofs and tall green trees at the left, emerald paddies cut into rectangles by narrow ochre banks all around, and a bare earth path running to the horizon under a blue sky strewn with white clouds. Standing on that path at the centre, the character 里 in deep brown: a four celled square threaded by a stem, then a short bar and a longer one below.

Pronunciation: lǐ
Strokes: 7
Level: HSK 1
Radical: 里
Made of: 田土

What it means

li, ancient measure of length, approx. 500 m; neighborhood; ancient administrative unit of 25 families; (Tw) borough, administrative unit between the township 鎮|镇[zhen4] and neighborhood 鄰|邻[lin2] levels

Where its shape comes from

Xu Shen builds it from two elements the course has already met: "the place where one dwells; from 田 and 土", the field and the earth, so the hamlet, then the ward of a town, then the unit of distance still called the li. The sense "inside" is not its own. That one belongs to 裏, the lining of a garment, which wrote 衣 around this very 里. The 1956 simplification folded the two into 里 alone, and it has carried both meanings ever since.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE); the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme (1956); the Chinese University of Hong Kong character database.

A way to remember it

The square of 田 set on 土, the two of them threaded on a single vertical. Under the square there are TWO bars and not one: the short one first, then the long one, which is the widest line in the character and where the vertical comes to a stop.

This is a memory aid, not the origin of the character.

Words it appears in

公里 gōng lǐ · HSK 4 kilometer
里程碑 lǐ chéng bēi · HSK 6 milestone
这里 zhè lǐ here
里面 lǐ miàn inside; interior; also pr. [li3 mian5]
心里 xīn li chest; heart; mind
那里 nà li there; that place

Writing it

See the stroke order of 里, animated stroke by stroke.