Jin (Chinese) to Grams (jin to g)

1 jin (Chinese) equals 500 grams exactly.

1 jin (Chinese) = 500 grams

How to convert jin (Chinese) to grams

To convert jin (Chinese) to grams, multiply the number of jin (Chinese) by 500. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply grams by 0.002.

grams = jin (Chinese) × 500

Example: 10 jin (Chinese) = 5,000 grams.

About these units

Jin (Chinese) (jin)

ChineseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Exactly 500 g in the modern Chinese market system, used in grocery markets across China. Often called a catty.

Anyone buying fruit or vegetables in a Chinese market is quoted prices per jin, and in English the unit is often called a catty, a word from the Malay kati. The historical jin shifted a great deal. Tables give about 250 g before the Qin, 220 g in the Eastern Han, 440 g in the Northern Wei, around 661 g in the Tang, 633 g in the Song and Yuan, and about 590 g in the Ming and Qing.

Modern values are tied to political decisions more than to ancient practice. The Republic's 1930 system set the jin at 500 g with 16 liang, and that mass was retained in mainland China after 1959, which is the figure used here. Hong Kong keeps a jin of about 604.79 g, and Taiwan uses 600 g. A jin is 10 liang on the mainland but 16 elsewhere, and 100 jin form one dan, also called a picul.

1 jin (Chinese) = 0.5 kilograms (exactly).

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

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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