Qian (Chinese) to Grams (qian to g)

1 qian (Chinese) equals 5 grams exactly.

1 qian (Chinese) = 5 grams

How to convert qian (Chinese) to grams

To convert qian (Chinese) to grams, multiply the number of qian (Chinese) by 5. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply grams by 0.2.

grams = qian (Chinese) × 5

Example: 10 qian (Chinese) = 50 grams.

About these units

Qian (Chinese) (qian)

ChineseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Exactly 5 g in the modern Chinese market system; one tenth of a liang.

Sitting between the liang and the fen, the qian was the working unit for small quantities of silver, medicine and spice. Its character also named a coin, and the weight is closely tied to the old coinage. Traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions have long been written in qian, and a regulation from 1979 treated the medicinal qian as exactly 3 g so that doses could be converted cleanly to metric.

Its size depends on the jin that it divides. Under the Republic from 1930 the qian was 1/160 of a jin, which gives 3.125 g, and a 1915 law gave about 3.73 g. After the People's Republic redefined the liang as one tenth of a jin, the qian became one tenth of a liang, which is the figure used here: 5 g. Hong Kong and Macau use about 3.78 g, and Taiwan uses 3.75 g.

1 qian (Chinese) = 0.005 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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