page_title: Suanpan
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Suanpan / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Zhao Tai Cheng herbal store in painting:Along the River During the Qingming Festival
context_page_description: The suanpan, also spelled suan pan or souanpan is an abacus of Chinese origin first described in a 190 CE book of the Eastern Han Dynasty, namely Supplementary Notes on the Art of Figures written by Xu Yue. However, the exact design of this suanpan is not known.
  Usually, a suanpan is about 20 cm tall and it comes in various widths depending on the application. It usually has more than seven rods. There are two beads on each rod in the upper deck and five beads on each rod in the bottom deck. The beads are usually rounded and made of a hardwood. The beads are counted by moving them up or down towards the beam. The suanpan can be reset to the starting position instantly by a quick jerk around the horizontal axis to spin all the beads away from the horizontal beam at the center.
  Suanpans can be used for functions other than counting. Unlike the simple counting board used in elementary schools, very efficient suanpan techniques have been developed to do multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, square root and cube root operations at high speed.
  The modern suanpan has 4+1 beads, colored beads to indicate position and a clear-all button.
context_section_description: The long scroll Along the River During Qing Ming Festival painted by Zhang Zeduan (1085–1145) during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) might contain a suanpan beside an account book and doctor's prescriptions on the counter of an apothecary.  However, the identification of the object as an abacus is a matter of some debate.
  The word "abacus" was first mentioned by Xu Yue(160–220) in his book suanshu jiyi (算数记遗), or Notes on Traditions of Arithmetic Methods, in Han Dynasty. As it described, the original abacus had five beads (suan zhu) bunched by a stick in each column, separated by a transverse rod, and arrayed in a wooden rectangle box. One in the upper part represents five and each of four in the lower part represents one. People move the beads to do the calculation.
  A 5+1 suanpan appeared in Ming dynasty, an illustration in a 1573 book on suanpan showed a suanpan with one bead on top and five beads at the bottom.
  The evident similarity of the Roman abacus to the Chinese one suggests that one must have inspired the other, as there is strong evidence of a trade relationship between the Roman Empire and China. However, no direct connection can be demonstrated, and the similarity of the abaci could be coincidental, both ultimately arising from counting with five fingers per hand. Where the Roman model and Chinese model (like most modern Japanese) has 4 plus 1 bead per decimal place, the old version of the Chinese suanpan has 5 plus 2, allowing less challenging arithmetic algorithms. Instead of running on wires as in the Chinese and Japanese models, the beads of Roman model run in grooves, presumably more reliable since the wires could be bent.
  Another possible source of the suanpan is Chinese counting rods, which operated with a place value decimal system with empty spot as zero.
caption: Suanpan on the apothecary's counter in Along the River During the Qingming Festival painting
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