Liang (simplified: 两, traditional: 兩, pinyin: liǎng, jyutping: loeng5) is the traditional Chinese unit of weight, one-sixteenth of a jin. Because silver circulated by weight rather than as coin, the liang was also the unit money was counted in, and it is in that second sense that it appears on nearly every page of wuxia fiction.
Overview
The liang did two jobs at once. It was a weight, used for anything measured finely — medicine, spices, tea, precious metal — and it was the reckoning unit for silver, which in imperial China was not minted into denominations but cast into ingots and cut, weighed and assayed at the point of use. A traveller carrying silver carried lumps of metal and a small steelyard balance. Prices were quoted in liang because a price was, quite literally, a weight of metal.
Sixteen liang made one jin. That ratio held for most of imperial history and is the arithmetic behind the idiom 半斤八两 — “half a jin and eight liang” — for two things not worth telling apart. Mainland China decimalised the jin to ten liang in 1959; the older sixteen is the one the novels assume.
Why this site uses liang and not tael
Older English translations of Chinese fiction almost always render 两 as tael, and a reader who has met the word elsewhere may find its absence here surprising. The choice is deliberate.
“Tael” is not an English rendering of a Chinese word. It came into English through Portuguese, from the Malay tahil, meaning “weight” — a word picked up in the ports of maritime Southeast Asia and carried into English by the East India Company and the treaty-port trade. Its sibling, catty, entered by exactly the same road, from the Malay kati; the same root also gave English caddy, as in the tea caddy on a shelf.
That shared history is the problem. These are not the words of Chinese metrology. They are the words of the people weighing the cargo — a vocabulary that let foreign merchants and foreign customs houses quantify Chinese goods for export, standardised at the treaty ports for the convenience of the trade rather than derived from anything a person in the story would have said. To write “five hundred taels of silver” is to describe a Song magistrate’s bribe in the idiom of a nineteenth-century Shanghai customs declaration.
It is worth being precise about the objection. The words are not slurs, and generations of capable translators have used them in good faith; “tael” is not wrong the way “martial brother” is wrong. But it seats the reader in the wrong room. The purpose of retaining jianghu, neili and shifu is to let the reader stand inside the world rather than outside it looking in, and a unit of money is exactly the kind of ordinary, high-frequency detail that either sustains that or quietly undoes it. Liang costs the reader one unfamiliar syllable and repays it at once, because it is the word the characters themselves are using.
The same reasoning governs jin, where “catty” is rejected on identical grounds.
Value
Because the liang is one-sixteenth of a jin, its mass moved whenever the jin did — roughly 40 g under the Song, near 37 g under the Ming and Qing. Translations here use the figure belonging to each novel’s era; see Jin (weight) for the table, and for how novels without a fixed historical setting are handled.
For most scenes the exact gram figure matters less than the scale. A few liang of silver settles an inn bill and a night’s lodging. Ten liang is a serious sum for an ordinary household. Rewards posted for a wanted xia run to hundreds; a commission worth escorting across provinces runs to thousands, which is why an armed escort exists at all. When a character produces silver “weighing some ten liang” without troubling to count it, the gesture is meant to read as careless wealth.
Related units
- Jin (斤) — sixteen liang
- Qian (钱) — one-tenth of a liang, the unit fine enough for medicine
- Wen (文) — a copper cash, the small change of daily life, exchanged against silver at a rate that shifted with the market
See also
- Mandarin Duck Blades concepts
- Twin Blades of the Storm Dragon concepts