Chinese capital and traditional numerals

Chinese numerals come in two kinds. The everyday ones are simple characters for 1 to 9 with characters for ten, hundred, thousand and ten thousand, and a zero character for any place in between that is 0. Cheques and receipts use the capital numerals instead: each digit and place has a capital character with many strokes, so an amount is hard to alter. Read one character by character: the place character after a digit tells you its place, and one zero character stands for one or more zero places in between. Another way: split at the ten-thousand character, read how many ten thousands come before it and what comes after, then put them together: 30000 + 450 = 30450. Roman numerals are another old way to write numbers: I 1, V 5, X 10, L 50, C 100, D 500, M 1000; a smaller letter after a bigger one adds (VI = 6), and before it takes away (IV = 4, XC = 90). Our base-ten system needs only the ten digits 0 to 9: the same digit in a different place has a different value, so any number can be written and worked with easily.