The Origin of Abacues

Exactly when and where the abacus was invented has now not been inspected, which can be traced back as early as 600 BC, when China is said to have had suanban(calculating sheet). The modern abacus is said to have evolved from ancient chousuan, which was a kind of calculating methord to use bamboo sticks as bargaining chips to carry out calculation operations. The end of the Dang Dynasty saw the great improvement in chousuan multiplication and division, and during the Song Dynasty, there emerged the division mnemonics.

Ancient Chinese people strung 10 beads into a group, each group arranged well into a rectangular wooden frame, then fiffling with beads to and fro to carry out calculating operations. During the last years of th Eastern Han Dynasty, in his Shu Shu Ji Yi, Xu Yue recorded his teacher's, Liu Hong, visit to a hermit Mr. Tianmu, who explained and demonstrated 14 sorts of calculating methords, one of which was zhusuan(calculating using beads) very close to modern abacus. That ancient abacus had 5 movable beads of each string, the upper bead an equivalent of 5, but each bead of the lower four ones representing one.

Some historians believe that the name of abacus first appeared in Mr.Jingxiu's Collected Works, authored by Liu Yin(1249-1293), a Yuan dynasty scholar. We can easily find an abacus on a store counter in the famous Chinese paiting Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival by Zhang Zeduan, a noted painter from the Northern Song Dynasty. So as early as the Northern Song Dynasty or even before it, abacues were making the widespread use of it all over ancient China.