Chinese Unit Converter

Online Chinese Measurement Converter for length, area, weight and capacity.

1 市斤 (jīn) — weight

jin

UnitValue
市两 liǎng 10.00 liang
市钱 qián 100.00 qian
市分 fēn 1,000.00 fen
市担 dàn 0.0100 dan
英石 yīngshí 0.0787 dan (shi)
公斤 gōngjīn 0.5000 kilogram
500.00 gram
dūn 0.0005 ton
bàng 1.1023 pound
盎司 àngsī 17.64 ounce

The old Chinese units, and why you still meet them

China uses the metric system, and has done officially for a long time. But the traditional units never went away: they were redefined against the metric ones rather than abolished, and they remain the everyday measures in the places where measuring is everyday. A market stall weighs in jin, which is now exactly half a kilogram. Land is counted in mu. Distances in an old text, a proverb or a novel are in li.

That redefinition is why conversion is exact rather than approximate today, and it is also why old sources cannot be converted with the same confidence: the same names covered noticeably different quantities before the twentieth century, and they varied from province to province.

The converter covers length, weight, area and capacity, in both directions. It is worth having open when you are reading a Chinese recipe, a property listing, a historical text, or anything where a number arrives with a unit you would otherwise have to guess at.

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