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 also commonly refer to days of the week, starting from Monday, as well as months of the year, whose names in Chinese are enumerations. In different regions signs for numbers vary significantly. One may interpret the "8" sign as a "7". The "index finger-hook" symbol for 9, also means "death" in other contexts. The numbers zero through five are simpler: Counting with fingers is often different from expressing a specific number with a finger gesture. When counting, the palm can be either facing its owner or the audience, depending on the purpose. Before counting, all fingers are closed; counting starts