Mu (Chinese) to Square Meters (mu to m²)

1 mu (Chinese) equals 666.6666667 square meters (rounded).

1 mu (Chinese) = 666.6666667 square meters

How to convert mu (Chinese) to square meters

To convert mu (Chinese) to square meters, multiply the number of mu (Chinese) by 666.6666667. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply square meters by 0.0015.

square meters = mu (Chinese) × 666.6666667

Example: 10 mu (Chinese) = 6,666.666667 square meters.

About these units

Mu (Chinese) (mu)

ChineseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Exactly 10,000/15 m² (666.67 m²), one fifteenth of a hectare. The standard unit of farmland in China.

A mu was once a plot defined by a square count of bu, the double pace used as a surveying step. Han-era writers recalled that in earlier times 100 square bu made a mu, while in their own day 240 were needed, and calculations from Han rulers give a mu of roughly 461 m². The size kept shifting. The 1915 Beiyang government law defined it as 60 square zhang, about 614.4 m².

The Republic's 1930 market system settled on 1/15 of a hectare, which is the 666.67 m² used here, and the mu is the only traditional Chinese area unit that survived the 1959 State Council decree. Farmland statistics in China are still given in mu, so that 15 mu make one hectare and 1,500 mu a square kilometre. Hong Kong and Macau use a mou of about 761.4 m², while Taiwan and Japan use a unit of about 99.17 m². The idiom of one mu and three fen of land describes a person's small personal patch.

1 mu (Chinese) = 666.6666667 square meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Mu (unit); Wikipedia: Chinese units of measurement

Square Meter (m²)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI unit of area: a square one meter on each side. Used for floor areas and property sizes in most of the world.

Squaring the meter was built into the metric system from the start. The French law of 18 Germinal, Year III (7 April 1795) defined the are, the land unit that gave the hectare its name, as exactly 100 square meters, so the square meter was already the foundation of metric land measure. Nobody is credited with inventing it as a separate unit. It is simply the area of a square one meter on each side, and any SI prefix that works for the meter works for it, with the prefix squared along with the unit.

That squaring catches people out: a square kilometer is one million square meters, not one thousand. Since 1983 the meter has been defined through the speed of light, so the square meter is tied to a constant of nature as well as to the second. A hectare, about the area of Trafalgar Square in London, is 10,000 square meters. In everyday terms one square meter is about 10.76 square feet. Unicode has a compatibility character for it, but the recommended way to write it is the plain superscript two: m².

The square meter is the reference unit for area on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Square metre; Wikipedia: Are (unit); NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition

Related conversions

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