Suzhou numerals

Still in use, mostly on price tags

蘇州碼子 — also 花碼 — descends from Song-dynasty commercial arithmetic and was the everyday shorthand of Chinese merchants into the twentieth century.

It has not entirely gone. Handwritten price tags in Hong Kong wet markets and dai pai dongs still use it, as do some traditional Chinese medicine shops and older ledgers. If you have wondered what the marks on a fish stall’s price card are, this is usually the answer.

The alternation rule, which tables leave out

Look at 1, 2 and 3: they are one, two and three vertical strokes. So 11 written naively is 〡〡 — four identical marks in a row, and no way to see where one numeral ends.

The convention solves it by alternating. When a digit from 1 to 3 follows another that was written with strokes, the second is written in its Han form instead:

• 11 is 〡一, not 〡〡
• 22 is 〢二
• 123 is 〡二〣 — the 3 returns to strokes, because the 二 before it already broke the run

That last case is the one implementations get wrong. The alternation exists to interrupt a sequence of strokes, so once a Han form has been written the run is broken and the next digit goes back to the stroke form. A converter that alternates on every digit produces 〡二三, which is not how it is written.

The two-line form

On a real price tag, Suzhou numerals are written on two lines: the digits on top, and the unit and denomination underneath — 十, 百, 斤, 元 and so on.

The bottom line is what makes the top line mean anything. 〣〥 alone is just “35”; with 十 and 元 below it, it is 350 dollars. That is why photographs of market price tags can be hard to read even once you know the digits: half the information is on the other line.

This page converts the digits. The unit line is written by whoever knows what they are selling.

Nothing is uploaded

Converted in this page.