Meters to Fen (Chinese) (m to fen)

1 meter equals 300 fen (Chinese) exactly.

1 meter = 300 fen (Chinese)

How to convert meters to fen (Chinese)

To convert meters to fen (Chinese), multiply the number of meters by 300. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply fen (Chinese) by 0.003333333333 (rounded).

fen (Chinese) = meters × 300

Example: 10 meters = 3,000 fen (Chinese).

About these units

Meter (m)

Metric (SI)Current unit

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

Fen (Chinese) (fen)

ChineseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

One tenth of a cun in the modern market system, 1/300 m (about 3.3 mm).

Smallest of the everyday Chinese length units, the fen shares its character with the ordinary word for a part or a share, which suits a unit defined as one hundredth of a chi. Older descriptions tie its size to the width of a grain of millet, so it was never a fixed physical quantity in antiquity. It had little use for long distances and appeared mainly in carpentry, tailoring and the fine measurements of craftsmen.

In the modern market system the chi is exactly one third of a meter, which makes the fen one three hundredth of a meter, about 3.33 millimeters. It sits below the cun, and ten fen make one cun. Because ancient chi were far shorter than today's, ancient fen were correspondingly smaller. A separate Chinese fen also exists as a mass unit, and the same word was borrowed for fractions of other quantities, so context matters when the term appears.

1 fen (Chinese) = 0.003333333333 meters (approximately).

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

Related conversions

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