Surface Area

The traditional Chinese system of measuring area,

面积

miàn jī

, is based on the Chinese acre:

亩

mǔ

, which is about 1/6 of an Imperial acre or 1/15 of a hectare, 666.67 sq. meters, or 7,176 sq. feet. There is also a traditional unit of area equal to 100 亩, the

顷

qǐng

, which was considered to the be amount of land needed to support a farming family. The table below presents these and other traditional terms for units of area. In the table above there are also words representing 1/10th of a 亩 1/100th of a 亩, and 1/1000 of a 亩, but notice that these three other units are not unique to measures of area, as they are also used for terms of distance, and actually they are the standard International System of Units (SI) prefixes for signifying 1/10th, 1/100th or 1/1000th of something. Recall in the section on distance, we saw the same three prefixes used for the standard metric terms for millimeter:

毫米

háo mǐ

, centimeter:

厘米

lí mǐ

, and decimeter:

分米

fēn mǐ

.

When using the standard metric or Imperial systems the term for square unit is used:

平方

píng fāng

. Below are some examples of the relationships between various types of units. Note the use of the word

等于

děng yú

for 'equals': For more on converting area measurements, this website has a convenient calculator for converting between Chinese, Metric and Imperial units: Chinese Weights and Measures

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