Glossary / Grades and Measures
Grades and Measures in Chinese: 47 Terms and Their English Renderings
The suffix vocabulary the genre puts on everything, plus the old time units characters still use.
47 terms
| Chinese | English | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 下品 | Low Grade | The bottom rank of an item. Cheap, and it shows. |
| 中品 | Middle Grade | Functional grade. What a working cultivator can actually afford. |
| 上品 | High Grade | Genuinely good. Worth guarding, and worth stealing. |
| 极品 | Peak Grade | The best of its tier. Rare enough to be a plot object. |
| 一品 | First Grade | Either the top of a numbered ranking or simply grade one. Context decides the direction. |
| 天阶 | Heaven Rank | The highest tier of techniques and treasures. Named after heaven, priced like it. |
| 地阶 | Earth Rank | Below heaven rank. What a strong regional sect might own one of. |
| 玄阶 | Mystic Rank | Mid tier. Standard issue for serious inner disciples. |
| 黄阶 | Yellow Rank | The lowest tier. Starting equipment. |
| 一炷香 | The time it takes to burn a stick of incense | About half an hour. Used as a deadline: 'kneel for one stick of incense.' |
| 一盏茶 | The time it takes to drink a cup of tea | A short while, maybe ten minutes. Looser and more casual than one stick of incense. |
| 丈 | Zhang | A unit of length, roughly three metres. 'Thirty zhang tall' is how big monsters get described. |
| 绝品 | Peerless | Beyond grading. A thing that exists once and cannot be replicated. |
| 半品 | Half Grade | A flawed item sitting between two grades. Sold as the higher one by dishonest merchants. |
| 层次 | Tier | A level within a grade. Small differences that decide fights. |
| 同阶 | Same Tier | Opponents of equal rank. The only fair fight, and the rarest. |
| 压阶 | Suppress a Tier | Forcing your power down to a lower grade. A disguise, or an insult. |
| 跳阶 | Jump a Tier | Advancing two grades at once. Impossible for most, routine for the protagonist. |
| 不入流 | Unranked | Below the lowest grade. Said of items, techniques and occasionally people, with the same tone. |
| 下下品 | Lowest Grade | The bottom of a four-step scale. Still usable, barely. |
| 九品制 | Nine-Tier System | Ranks one to nine, where nine is ambiguous: highest in some systems, lowest in others. Check before translating a number. |
| 天地玄黄 | Heaven, Earth, Dark, Yellow | The classic four-tier ordering, from best to worst. Borrowed from the Thousand Character Classic, which most readers no longer recognise. |
| 宇宙洪荒 | Space, Time, Flood, Desolation | The other classic four, used when an author wants to sound archaic. Same structure, different words. |
| 超品 | Beyond Grade | An item that does not fit the scale. Shorthand for 'this arc will be about this thing'. |
| 伪品 | False Grade | Rated high and performing low. A con, or a decayed original. |
| 上中下三品 | Upper, Middle, Lower | The simplest grading scheme. Found in older texts and in sects that dislike bureaucracy. |
| 一品至九品官职 | Official Rank | Court ranks, borrowed into cultivation fiction for imperial and sect administration. Nine one way or the other, depending on dynasty. |
| 尊品 | Honoured Grade | Above the scale, reserved for imperial gifts. Rare enough to be a plot point. |
| 超阶 | Beyond Tier | Anything that does not fit. The author's way of saying the scale is done. |
| 一刻钟 | One Quarter Hour | Fifteen minutes, borrowed from the old hour system. Precise, and therefore used for escapes. |
| 半个时辰 | Half a Shi | One hour. The most common unit for a fight that is going badly. |
| 一个时辰 | One Shi | Two hours. Long enough for a battle, short enough to be a deadline. |
| 三日 | Three Days | The standard grace period. Anything promised in three days happens on the third night. |
| 七七四十九天 | Forty-Nine Days | A ritual or refining period, drawn from Buddhist practice. Comfortably long for an author to cut away from. |
| 九九八十一天 | Eighty-One Days | The longer variant. Used for refining something the plot needs urgently. |
| 三年之约 | Three-Year Pact | The duel everyone agrees to and nobody forgets. Its structure is so fixed that readers know the outcome at the announcement. |
| 十年之期 | Ten-Year Term | The longer version, usually between master and disciple. Comes due in the last act. |
| 半刻 | Half a Quarter | Seven or eight minutes. The unit of a desperate dash. |
| 一息 | One Breath | A few seconds. Used for feats described as 'in a single breath', which is the genre's way of saying instant. |
| 百步 | A Hundred Paces | The range where spear beats sword, and where a bow becomes useless. A distance with tactical meaning. |
| 十里 | Ten Li | Five kilometres. The standard radius for 'everyone in the region felt it'. |
| 百里 | A Hundred Li | Fifty kilometres. Used for the scale of a sect's territory or a chase. |
| 万里 | Ten Thousand Li | The measure of an empire or a journey arc. Not literal, but not entirely figurative either. |
| 尺 | Chi | About a third of a metre. Used for blade lengths and for very close escapes. |
| 寸 | Cun | About three centimetres. Where a sword stops short. |
| 斗 | Dou | A measure of grain, used for stipends. The unit that tells you whether a sect pays well. |
| 两 | Tael | A unit of silver weight. Used for mortal-world prices, and for contrast with spirit stones. |
The time units are the part translators most often flatten into "a while", which loses the texture. Terms follow the free cultivation novels at cultivationnovel.com.
Source: cultivationnovel.com · Cultivation Glossary