Cun (Chinese) to Meters (cun to m)
1 cun (Chinese) equals 0.03333333333 meters (rounded).
How to convert cun (Chinese) to meters
To convert cun (Chinese) to meters, multiply the number of cun (Chinese) by 0.03333333333. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply meters by 30.
meters = cun (Chinese) × 0.03333333333
Example: 10 cun (Chinese) = 0.3333333333 meters.
About these units
Cun (Chinese) (cun)
The Chinese inch, 1/30 m (about 3.33 cm) in the modern market system. Also used in acupuncture, where a 'body cun' is proportional to the patient.
Hand anatomy gave the cun its role. The traditional definition is the width of a person's thumb at the knuckle, and the unit is commonly translated as the Chinese inch. That human scale is the reason acupuncture still uses a body cun, which is proportional to the patient and is not a fixed number of millimeters. Two forefingers side by side are counted as 1.5 cun, and four fingers together as 3 cun.
As a measure of ordinary objects, the cun is one tenth of a chi and ten times a fen. Under the modern market system it equals 10/3 centimeters, roughly 3.33 cm. Hong Kong kept a British-influenced standard in which the cun is about 3.715 cm, and Japan's related sun is about 3.03 cm, so the same character covers several different sizes in different places. The phrase chi cun, literally foot and inch, also became the everyday Chinese word for dimensions.
1 cun (Chinese) = 0.03333333333 meters (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: Cun (unit); Wikipedia: Chi (unit)
Meter (m)
The SI base unit of length. Since 1983 it is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
Meter comes from the Greek metron, a measure. In 1791 the French National Assembly defined it as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, after rejecting the length of a seconds pendulum because that length changes with local gravity. The surveyors Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian arc, and in 1799 a platinum bar known as the Mètre des Archives became the physical standard. NIST notes that this Earth-based meter turned out to be about 0.2 mm shorter than the true pole-to-equator fraction it was meant to represent.
The 1875 Treaty of the Meter created the CGPM and the BIPM to look after common standards, and in 1889 a platinum-iridium prototype bar took over; the original is still kept at the BIPM. In 1960 the meter was tied to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of an orange-red krypton-86 line, and in 1983 to the speed of light, which made length a quantity derived from the time standard. The 2018 revision reworded that definition without changing the meter's size. NIST offers a handy yardstick for scale: a pace, meaning two steps, is roughly a meter or a yard.
The meter is the reference unit for length on this site.
Sources: BIPM: history of the metre; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Metre
Related conversions
- Meters to cun (Chinese) (reverse)
- Cun (Chinese) to kilometers
- Cun (Chinese) to centimeters
- Cun (Chinese) to millimeters
- Cun (Chinese) to inches
- Cun (Chinese) to feet
- Cun (Chinese) to yards
- Cun (Chinese) to miles
- Kilometers to meters
- Centimeters to meters
- Millimeters to meters
- Inches to meters
- Feet to meters
- Yards to meters
- Miles to meters
- Micrometers to meters
- Nanometers to meters
- Nautical miles to meters
- Pixels (CSS) to meters
- Light-years to meters
See all length units.