Dan (Chinese) to Grams (dan to g)

1 dan (Chinese) equals 50,000 grams exactly.

1 dan (Chinese) = 50,000 grams

How to convert dan (Chinese) to grams

To convert dan (Chinese) to grams, multiply the number of dan (Chinese) by 50,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply grams by 0.00002.

grams = dan (Chinese) × 50,000

Example: 10 dan (Chinese) = 500,000 grams.

About these units

Dan (Chinese) (dan)

ChineseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

100 jin, or 50 kg in the modern market system. Historically known as the picul; Hong Kong's picul is about 60.48 kg.

Dan means a burden, and the character 擔 shows a person carrying a load on a pole across the shoulders. The same unit is written 石 in older texts and is known in English as the picul, a word borrowed from Malay for carrying something on the shoulder. For most of imperial history a dan was 120 catties, roughly what one porter could manage, and it served for rice, salt, tea and other bulk goods moved by caravan, boat or road.

Because the underlying jin changed from dynasty to dynasty, the dan drifted too. The jin was about 250 g before the Qin, around 220 g under the Eastern Han, about 633 g in the Tang and Song periods, and about 590 g under the Ming and Qing. The Republic of China fixed the market system in 1930 and the People's Republic kept it, so the figure used here is 100 jin of 500 g, or exactly 50 kg. That is a convenient fifty-kilogram sack, and it still appears in farm and grain statistics. Hong Kong kept its own picul of 60.478982 kg.

1 dan (Chinese) = 50 kilograms (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Chinese units of measurement; Wikipedia: Picul; Wikipedia: Catty

Gram (g)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One thousandth of a kilogram. The standard unit for food quantities and small objects.

A gram was once defined as a small drop of the natural world. The French National Convention of 1795 set it as the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to a cube one hundredth of a metre on each side, a cubic centimetre. The reference temperature was first the melting point of ice and was later changed to the temperature of maximum density of water, about 4 degrees Celsius. The word came into French as gramme, from Late Latin gramma, itself from the Greek for a letter or small mark; in Late Antiquity it meant about one twenty-fourth of an ounce.

The gram was the base unit of mass in the centimetre-gram-second system, but in 1960 the SI took the kilogram as its base unit, which made the gram one thousandth of it. That is why it appears in so many everyday places: it is the standard for non-liquid ingredients in cooking and shopping, and nutrition labels commonly list contents per 100 g. For a sense of scale, a small paper clip or a pen cap weighs about a gram, and a Japanese 1-yen coin is close to exactly that, while a US penny is around 2.5 g.

1 gram = 0.001 kilograms (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Gram; Wikipedia: Kilogram

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