Chinese numerals

Published June 30, 2026 · By NumberWiki

Chinese numerals are decimal, like ours, but built differently: instead of position alone, each place has a named value. 二萬三千四百五十六 reads literally "2-myriad 3-thousand 4-hundred 5-ten 6" — 23,456. The system comes in two registers: the everyday characters everyone learns first, and a set of elaborate financial characters designed to be forgery-proof on cheques and contracts.

The everyday characters

The digits one through ten, plus the place words:

1–9: 一二三四五六七八九
Places: 十 (ten), 百 (hundred), 千 (thousand), 萬 (ten-thousand / "myriad"), 億 (hundred-million).
Zero: 零 (also written 〇).

Numbers are spoken and written as digit-plus-place: 25 is 二十五 ("two-ten-five"), 100 is 一百 ("one-hundred"), 1,492 is 一千四百九十二. A zero inside a number is marked with 零 to show a skipped place — 1,005 is 一千零五 ("one-thousand zero five") — so the reader knows the hundreds and tens are empty.

Grouping by ten-thousands, not thousands

The biggest structural difference from Western numbers is the myriad. English groups large numbers in thousands (thousand, million, billion — steps of 10³). Chinese groups in ten-thousands: 萬 (10⁴), 億 (10⁸), 兆 (10¹²). So one million is 一百萬 ("one hundred ten-thousands") and 100 million is 一億. This "myriad scale" is shared across East Asian languages and is why converting large numbers between English and Chinese takes a moment's regrouping.

The financial characters (大寫)

The simple everyday characters are dangerously easy to alter — 一 (1), 二 (2), and 三 (3) are just one, two, and three strokes, and a 十 (10) can become a 千 (1,000) with a couple of pen strokes. To prevent fraud on financial documents, China developed a parallel set of complex homophone characters, the 大寫 ("capital forms"):

1–9: 壹貳參肆伍陸柒捌玖
Places: 拾 (ten), 佰 (hundred), 仟 (thousand), 萬, 億.

These are still mandatory today on cheques, bank drafts, tax forms, and contracts throughout China and Taiwan — the equivalent of writing "one thousand four hundred and ninety-two" in words on a Western cheque, but at the level of every individual digit. The practice goes back over a thousand years; tradition credits the Tang-dynasty empress Wu Zetian, and the Ming dynasty made the standardised set law after a major embezzlement scandal.

A note on positional Chinese

Alongside this spoken-style system, China also developed genuinely positional numerals — the rod numerals used on counting boards from antiquity, which had an empty space (later a circle ○) for zero and supported sophisticated calculation centuries before the place-value idea reached Europe. The everyday written characters above, though, remain the way numbers are normally written in prose.

Reading Chinese numerals on this site

NumberWiki renders both the everyday and financial (大寫) forms for numbers up to the hundred-billions, with the 零 zero-bridge inserted where a middle place is skipped. Both appear in each number page's Historical numeral systems section.