Chinese Unit Of Measurement
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Chinese Unit Of Measurement
Chinese units of measurement, known in Chinese as the ''shìzhì'' ("market system"), are the traditional units of measurement of the Han Chinese. Although Chinese numerals have been decimal (base-10) since the Shang, several Chinese measures use hexadecimal (base-16). Local applications have varied, but the Chinese dynasties usually proclaimed standard measurements and recorded their predecessor's systems in their histories. In the present day, the People's Republic of China maintains some customary units based upon the market units but standardized to round values in the metric system, for example the common '' jin'' or catty of exactly 500 g. The Chinese name for most metric units is based on that of the closest traditional unit; when confusion might arise, the word "market" (, ''shì'') is used to specify the traditional unit and "common" or "public" (, ''gōng'') is used for the metric value. Taiwan, like Korea, saw its traditional units standardized to Japanese values and ...
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Mainland China
"Mainland China", also referred to as "the Chinese mainland", is a Geopolitics, geopolitical term defined as the territory under direct administration of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War. In addition to the geographical mainland, the geopolitical sense of the term includes islands such as Hainan, Chongming Island, Chongming, and Zhoushan. By convention, territories outside of mainland China include: * Special administrative regions of China, which are regarded as subdivisions of the country, but retain distinct administrative, judicial and economic systems from those on the mainland: ** Hong Kong, formerly a British Hong Kong, British colony ** Macau, formerly a Portuguese Macau, Portuguese colony * Taiwan, along with Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu Islands, Matsu and other minor islands, are collectively known as the Taiwan Area, where has been the major territorial base of the government of the Republic of China (ROC) since 1950. Though the ...
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Japanese Units Of Measurement
Traditional Japanese units of measurement or the shakkanhō () is the customary units, traditional system of measurement used by the people of the Japanese archipelago. It is largely based on the Chinese units of measurement, Chinese system, which spread to Japan and the rest of the Sinosphere in antiquity. It has remained mostly unaltered since the adoption of the measures of the Tang dynasty in 701. Following the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Imperial Japan metrication, adopted the metric system and defined the traditional units in metric terms on the basis of a prototype metre and prototype kilogram, kilogram. The present values of most Korean units, Korean and Taiwanese units of measurement derive from these values as well. For a time in the early 20th century, the traditional, metric, and English units, English systems were all legal in Japan. Although commerce has since been legally restricted to using the metric system, the old system is still used in some instances. The old meas ...
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Zhou Dynasty
The Zhou dynasty ( ) was a royal dynasty of China that existed for 789 years from until 256 BC, the longest span of any dynasty in Chinese history. During the Western Zhou period (771 BC), the royal house, surnamed Ji, had military control over territories centered on the Wei River valley and North China Plain. Even as Zhou suzerainty became increasingly ceremonial over the following Eastern Zhou period (771–256 BC), the political system created by the Zhou royal house survived in some form for several additional centuries. A date of 1046 BC for the Zhou's establishment is supported by the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project and David Pankenier, but David Nivison and Edward L. Shaughnessy date the establishment to 1045 BC. The latter Eastern Zhou period is itself roughly subdivided into two parts. During the Spring and Autumn period (), power became increasingly decentralized as the authority of the royal house diminished. The Warring States ...
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Ruler
A ruler, sometimes called a rule, scale, line gauge, or metre/meter stick, is an instrument used to make length measurements, whereby a length is read from a series of markings called "rules" along an edge of the device. Usually, the instrument is rigid and the edge itself is a straightedge ("ruled straightedge"), which additionally allows one to draw straighter lines. Rulers are an important tool in geometry, geography and mathematics. They have been used since at least 2650 BC. Variants Rulers have long been made from different materials and in multiple sizes. Historically, they were mainly wood but plastics have also been used. They can be created with length markings instead of being wikt:scribe, scribed. Metal is also used for more durable rulers for use in the workshop; sometimes a metal edge is embedded into a wooden desk ruler to preserve the edge when used for straight-line cutting. Typically in length, though some can go up to 100 cm, it is useful for a ruler to ...
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Yu The Great
Yu the Great or Yu the Engineer was a legendary king in ancient China who was credited with "the first successful state efforts at flood control", his establishment of the Xia dynasty, which inaugurated Dynasties in Chinese history, dynastic rule in China, and for his upright moral character. He figures prominently in the Chinese legend titled "Great Yu Controls the Waters" (). Yu and other sage-kings of ancient China were lauded for their virtues and morals by Confucius and other Chinese teachers. He is one of the few Chinese monarchs who is posthumously honored with the epithet "the Great". There is no contemporary evidence of Yu's existence as traditionally attested in the ''Shiji''. Yu is said to have ruled as sage-king during the late 3rd millennium BC, which predates the oracle bone script used during the late Shang dynasty—the oldest known form of writing in China—by nearly a millennium. Yu's name was not inscribed on any artifacts which were produced during the ...
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Records Of The Grand Historian
The ''Shiji'', also known as ''Records of the Grand Historian'' or ''The Grand Scribe's Records'', is a Chinese historical text that is the first of the Twenty-Four Histories of imperial China. It was written during the late 2nd and early 1st centuries BC by the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, building upon work begun by his father Sima Tan. The work covers a 2,500-year period from the age of the legendary Yellow Emperor to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han in the author's own time, and describes the world as it was known to the Chinese of the Western Han dynasty. The ''Shiji'' has been called a "foundational text in Chinese civilization". After Confucius and Qin Shi Huang, "Sima Qian was one of the creators of Imperial China, not least because by providing definitive biographies, he virtually created the two earlier figures." The ''Shiji'' set the model for all subsequent dynastic histories of China. In contrast to Western historiographical conventions, the ''Shiji'' does no ...
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Kongzi Jiayu
The ''Kongzi Jiayu'' (), translated as ''The School Sayings of Confucius'' or ''Family Sayings of Confucius'', is a collection of sayings of Confucius (Kongzi), written as a supplement to the ''Analects'' (''Lunyu''). A book by the title had existed since at least the early Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), and was listed in the 1st-century imperial bibliography '' Yiwenzhi'' with 27 scrolls. The extant version, however, was thought by later scholars to have been compiled by the Cao Wei official-scholar Wang Su (195–256 AD), and contains 10 scrolls and 44 sections. Thus, Chinese scholars had long concluded that the received text was a 3rd-century forgery by Wang Su that had nothing to do with the original text of the same title. However, this verdict has been overturned by archaeological discoveries of Western Han dynasty tombs at Dingzhou (55 BC) and Shuanggudui (165 BC). Contents In the postface to the ''Kongzi Jiayu'', its author describes the collection as discussions Con ...
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Xiao Erya
The ''Xiao Erya'' (; "Little ra") was an early Chinese dictionary that supplements the ''Erya''. It was supposedly compiled in the early Han dynasty by Kong Fu ( 264?–208 BCE), a descendant of Confucius. However, the received ''Xiao Erya'' text was included in a Confucianist collection of debates, the ''Kongcongzi'' (; ''K'ung-ts'ung-tzu''; "The Kong Family Master's Anthology"), which contains fabrications that its first editor Wang Su (, 195–256 CE) added to win his arguments with Zheng Xuan (, 127–200 CE). The Qing dynasty scholar Hu Chenggong (, 1776–1832), who wrote the ''Xiao Erya yizheng'' ( "Exegesis and Proof for the ''Xiao Erya''"), accepted Kong Fu as the author. Liu concludes the ''Xiao Erya'' reliably dates from the Western Han dynasty and suggests its compiler was from the southern state of Chu. The ''Xiao Erya'' has 374 entries, far less than the ''Erya'' with 2091. It simplifies the ''Eryas 19 semantically-based chapter divisions into 13, and entitles them ...
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Yellow Emperor
The Yellow Emperor, also known as the Yellow Thearch, or Huangdi ( zh, t=黃帝, s=黄帝, first=t) in Chinese, is a mythical Chinese sovereign and culture hero included among the legendary Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. He is revered as a deity individually or as part of the Wufang Shangdi, Five Regions Highest Deities () in Chinese folk religion. Regarded as the initiator of Chinese culture, he is traditionally credited with numerous innovations – including the traditional Chinese calendar, Taoism, wooden houses, boats, carts, the compass needle, "the earliest forms of writing", and cuju, ''cuju'', a ball game. Calculated by Jesuits in China, Jesuit missionaries, as based on various Chinese chronicles, Huangdi's traditional reign dates begin in either 2698 or 2697 BC, spanning one hundred years exactly, later accepted by the twentieth-century promoters of a universal calendar starting with the Yellow Emperor. Huangdi's cult is first attested in the Warring States peri ...
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Liji
The ''Book of Rites'', also known as the ''Liji'', is a collection of texts describing the social forms, administration, and ceremonial rites of the Zhou dynasty as they were understood in the Warring States and the early Han periods. The ''Book of Rites'', along with the ''Rites of Zhou'' () and the '' Book of Etiquette and Rites'' (), which are together known as the "Three Li ()," constitute the ritual () section of the Five Classics which lay at the core of the traditional Confucian canon (each of the "five" classics is a group of works rather than a single text). As a core text of the Confucian canon, it is also known as the ''Classic of Rites'' or ''Lijing'', which some scholars believe was the original title before it was changed by Dai Sheng. History The ''Book of Rites'' is a diverse collection of texts of uncertain origin and date that lacks the overall structure found in the other "rites" texts (the ''Rites of Zhou'' and the '' Etiquette and Ceremonial''). Some s ...
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Bronze Ruler
Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals (such as phosphorus) or metalloids (such as arsenic or silicon). These additions produce a range of alloys some of which are harder than copper alone or have other useful properties, such as strength, ductility, or machinability. The archaeological period during which bronze was the hardest metal in widespread use is known as the Bronze Age. The beginning of the Bronze Age in western Eurasia is conventionally dated to the mid-4th millennium BCE (~3500 BCE), and to the early 2nd millennium BCE in China; elsewhere it gradually spread across regions. The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age, which started about 1300 BCE and reaching most of Eurasia by about 500 BCE, although bronze continued to be much more widely used than it is in modern times. Because historical artworks we ...
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Hong Kong Units Of Measurement
Hong Kong has three main systems of units of measurement in current use: * The Chinese units of measurement of the Qing Empire (no longer in widespread use in mainland China); * British Imperial units; and * The metric system. In 1976 the Hong Kong Government started the conversion to the metric system, and as of 2012 measurements for government purposes, such as road signs, are almost always in metric units. However, all three systems are officially permitted for trade, and in the wider society a mixture of all three systems prevails. Length The metric system is used for all official purposes in Hong Kong, however, the imperial system is sometimes used in informal situations. The Chinese system's most commonly used units were (Li (unit), li), (Zhàng, tseung/cheung), (Chi (unit), tsek/chek), (Cun (unit), tsun/chun), (Candareen, fen/fan) in descending scale order. The legal units for trade include , and only, but they are no longer in daily use, with the words and com ...
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