West Asian numbersįor calculating, Chinese people used number rods: they arranged short bamboo rods in patterns, with the numbers from 1-10 represented by horizontal rods, while the tens place had vertical rods, and the hundreds were horizontal again (6-9 are upside-down versions rather than really horizontal). This way of writing numbers made it easier to do addition and multiplication than the West Asian system, which used base 60. In China, people wrote the number 465 like this: 4 times the symbol for hundreds plus 6 times the symbol for ten plus 5. But the Chinese system was more efficient. Chinese people counted in base ten, like people in India. Maybe they learned it from people in West Asia or India. Nobody knows whether people in China thought of the idea to write numbers for themselves. It’s more than a thousand years later than people began to write numbers in India. This is about two thousand years later than people began to write numbers in West Asia. People in China were using written numbers by about 1500 BC, in the Shang Dynasty. Chinese numbers: number rods Chinese numbers