16 (number) old days, weighing was done with a beam balance to make equal splits. It would be easier to split a heap of grains into sixteen equal parts through successive divisions than to split into ten parts. Chinese Taoists did finger computation on the trigrams and hexagrams by counting the finger tips and joints of the fingers with the tip of the thumb. Each hand can count up to 16 in such manner. The Chinese abacus uses two upper beads to represent the 5s and 5 lower beads to represent the 1s, the 7 beads can represent a hexadecimal digit from
Chinese number gestures representing bowing. When playing "drinking finger games" (划拳, 猜拳), slightly different sets of finger gestures of numbers is used. One of them is: The gesture of the digit 0 is used for showing numbers like 20, 30, 40, etc, where the left hand shows the tens digit and the right hand shows the digit 0. Chinese number gestures Chinese number gestures are a method to signify the natural numbers one through ten using one hand. This method may have been developed to bridge the many varieties of Chinese—for example, the numbers 4 () and 10 () are hard to distinguish