Meters to Zhang (Chinese) (m to zhang)
1 meter equals 0.3 zhang (Chinese) exactly.
How to convert meters to zhang (Chinese)
To convert meters to zhang (Chinese), multiply the number of meters by 0.3. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply zhang (Chinese) by 3.333333333 (rounded).
zhang (Chinese) = meters × 0.3
Example: 10 meters = 3 zhang (Chinese).
About these units
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
Zhang (Chinese) (zhang)
Ten chi, 10/3 m (about 3.33 m) in the modern market system.
Ten chi made one zhang, so the unit was always a measure of the human scale of buildings and cloth rather than of personal reach. It turns up in Chinese architecture as a way to describe the width of a bay and the height of walls and pillars. Since the chi itself changed from dynasty to dynasty, the zhang changed in step with it and had no independent standard.
Republican law fixed it twice. In 1915 the Republic of China set it at about 3.2 m, and in 1930 the figure was revised to exactly 10/3 m, about 3.33 m, which is the value used here. Mainland China uses it rarely today, and everyday speech tends toward meters. The Japanese jo is built the same way from ten shaku, giving about 3.03 m, which shows how a shared structure produced different lengths.
1 zhang (Chinese) = 3.333333333 meters (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: Zhang (unit); Wikipedia: Chinese units of measurement
Related conversions
- Zhang (Chinese) to meters (reverse)
- Meters to kilometers
- Meters to centimeters
- Meters to millimeters
- Meters to inches
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- Meters to yards
- Meters to miles
- Meters to micrometers
- Meters to nanometers
- Meters to nautical miles
- Meters to pixels (CSS)
- Meters to light-years
- Kilometers to zhang (Chinese)
- Centimeters to zhang (Chinese)
- Millimeters to zhang (Chinese)
- Inches to zhang (Chinese)
- Feet to zhang (Chinese)
- Yards to zhang (Chinese)
- Miles to zhang (Chinese)
See all length units.