Why the Bank Wants 壹, Not 一 — Epoche B1
Dear Li, You asked me why the bank returned your uncle's transfer form when the amount on it was perfectly clear. I asked at my own branch this week, and the answer deserves a letter: it is a writing system repairing its own weakness. The everyday numerals are too simple to be safe. One, two and three are written 一, 二, 三 — one, two and three strokes. Whoever holds the paper afterwards can add a line: 一 becomes 二, 二 becomes 三, and a single vertical stroke turns 一 into 十, ten. I tried it with my own pen; the forgery took two seconds. So for money Chinese keeps a second set, the daxie or capital numerals: 壹 for one, 贰 for two, 叁 for three, 拾 for ten, 佰 for a hundred, 仟 for a thousand. Read aloud, they sound the same as the plain ones. The difference is on the paper: there is no stroke you can add to 壹 that will ever make it 贰. Once you know the set, you see it everywhere. On a hundred-yuan note, beside the big 100, it says 壹佰圆 — one hundred yuan in capitals. Every contract and bank form has a line for the amount in capital characters, and the sum ends with 整, "exact", so that nothing can be written after it. Chinese accounts trace the rule to the early Ming, when the emperor made the complex forms compulsory in official books after a huge embezzlement case. Your uncle wrote the amount in ordinary characters on the capitals line. The clerk was not being difficult; that line accepts only 伍仟元整 — five thousand yuan, exact, in characters nobody can quietly improve. Tell him it is not modern fussiness. It is six centuries of experience with ink. Yours, Mei References Confucius (c. 475 BCE). The Analects. (Various translations available, e.g., Legge, J. (1861). The Chinese Classics, Vol. I: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean. Hong Kong: Lane, Crawford & Co.). Li Bai (c. 701–762 CE). Collected Works of Li Bai. (Various translations available, e.g., Hinton, D. (1996). The Selected Poems of Li Po. New York: New Directions).