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
HSK1
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.

How it used to be written

Forms, sources and dates: the 字形演變 database of 小學堂, Academia Sinica, public domain (CC0).

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

See the 10 HSK words built on 里, grouped by level.

Writing it

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

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