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
Counting rods 10. Each time one shifts a number one position to the right, it is divided by 10. This applies to single-digit numbers or multiple-digit numbers. Song dynasty mathematician Jia Xian used hand-written Chinese decimal orders 步十百千萬 as rod numeral place value, as evident from a facsimile from a page of Yongle Encyclopedia. He arranged 七萬一千八百二十四 as He treated the Chinese order numbers as place value markers, and 七一八二四 became place value decimal number. He then wrote the rod numerals according to their place value: In Japan, mathematicians put counting rods on a counting board, a sheet of cloth with grids,