Li (Chinese) to Millimeters (li to mm)

1 li (Chinese) equals 500,000 millimeters exactly.

1 li (Chinese) = 500,000 millimeters

How to convert li (Chinese) to millimeters

To convert li (Chinese) to millimeters, multiply the number of li (Chinese) by 500,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply millimeters by 0.000002.

millimeters = li (Chinese) × 500,000

Example: 10 li (Chinese) = 5,000,000 millimeters.

About these units

Li (Chinese) (li)

ChineseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

The modern Chinese 'mile', set at exactly 500 meters. Imperial-era li varied widely, from about 323 m under the Tang to roughly 540-650 m under the Qing.

Field and earth are the two components of the character for li, an apt picture of a distance about the size of a village. Chinese travel writing, military records and poetry counted roads in li, and phrases such as the ten-thousand-li Great Wall or thousand-li horses turned it into a figure of speech for great distance. English writers sometimes call it a Chinese mile, though it is nearer a third of an English mile.

Its length followed the chi and the number of chi counted per li. Wikipedia lists about 358 m for the Western Zhou, about 416 m for the Han, about 323 m for the Tang and 537 to 645 m for the Qing, when some usage counted 1,800 chi per li instead of 1,500. Republican li ranged around 500 to 545 m. The figure used here is the modern value of exactly 500 m, which is 1,500 modern chi.

1 li (Chinese) = 500 meters (exactly).

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

Millimeter (mm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One thousandth of a meter. Used in engineering, manufacturing and rainfall measurement.

Carl Friedrich Gauss put the millimeter at the base of his 1832 proposal for absolute units, pairing it with the milligram and the second, although the centimeter-based CGS system later won out among scientists. The name combines the metric prefix milli-, from the Latin for one thousand, with the meter. Since 1983 a millimeter has been tied to the speed of light: it is the distance light covers in 1/299,792,458,000 of a second.

Millimeters are the language of fine mechanical work. Standard rulers are divided into them, digital calipers commonly read to 0.01 mm, and mechanical pencil leads come in 0.5 and 0.7 mm. Copy paper is about 0.1 mm thick, and a thin hair, at 0.02 to 0.04 mm across, is close to the smallest thing the naked eye can see. A wave with a frequency of 300 GHz has a wavelength of 1 mm. An inch is exactly 25.4 mm. One trap for readers in the United States is that mil there traditionally means a thousandth of an inch, not a millimeter.

1 millimeter = 0.001 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Millimetre; Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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