Li (unit)

Li or ri (Chinese: 里; pinyin: lǐ, or Chinese: 市里; pinyin: shìlǐ) is a traditional Chinese unit of distance. The li has varied considerably over time but was usually about one third of an English mile and now has a standardized length of a half-kilometer (500 meters or 1,640 feet or 0.311 miles). This is then divided into 1,500 chi, or "Chinese feet". The character 里 combines the characters for "field" (田; tián) and "earth" (土; tǔ), since it was considered to be about the length of a single village. As late as the 1940s, a "li" did not represent a fixed measure but could be longer or shorter depending on the effort required to cover the distance. This traditional unit, in terms of historical usage and distance proportion, can be considered the East Asian counterpart to the Western league unit. However, in English league commonly means "3 miles." There is also another li (simplified Chinese: 厘; traditional Chinese: 釐; pinyin: lí) that indicates a unit of length 1⁄1000 of a chi, but it is used much less commonly. This li is used in the People's Republic of China as the equivalent of the centi- prefix in metric units, thus límǐ (厘米) for centimeter. The tonal difference makes it distinguishable to speakers of Chinese, but unless specifically noted otherwise, any reference to li will always refer to the longer traditional unit and not to either the shorter unit or the kilometer.