Chinese Food Coupons : Intro 0 c

There are diffent ways to collect Chinese Food Coupons.

* By year of issue
* By state or province
* By type (rice or grain, cloths, oil, other objects, ....)
* By weight, unit, amount, ...

On each coupon, normally we can easily find this info.
I wrote about the dates already, and the cities or provinces will be explained in future posts.

Similar coupons, can be sorted out by city or province, or issuing administration.

Food coupons - city or province is marked

Central on each coupon, we find the number of kilograms, grams, units ... of each value.
Most of these units return on each coupon, therefore some examples :

Food coupons - amount and unit is marked

When there are 3 characters, the first one indicates often the amount, the last two indicate the unit.

A "shi-liang" equals 50 gram of cerials.
Coupons of 2 市两 , represent 100 gram of grains/cerials

shi liang

A "shi-jin" equals half a kilogram of cerials.
Coupons of 1 市斤, represent 500 gram of grains/cerials

shi jin

When there's a number in arabic numbers and one character, the last (only) character indicates the unit. Sometimes the unit is so obvious, that the preceding characters only can indicate a number.
In Chinese counting, 500 is written as 5 100 (2 characters) - 5000 is writte as 5 1000 (two characters),
2500 is written as 2 1000 5 100 (four characters).

This goes for 'gram' or 'ké' - often the unit is preceded by arabic numbers - sometimes with multiple chinese characters.

ké - gram

Coupons of 500 克 , represent half a kilogram.

Another common unit is "sheng", or liter.
In the old days (pre 1915) a 'sheng was slightly more then one liter. But due to standardisation, it became 1 liter in 1930.

wu (5) sheng (liter)

Coupons of 5 升 , represent 5 liters of fuel.

(市) 升 - 1 liter - 2.113 US pint - 1.760 UK pint

to be continued ...