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Free Chinese abacus

Virtual Suanpan

Play and practise on a free Chinese suanpan online — two heaven beads and five earth beads on every rod, all of them draggable. Set any number, park a rod above nine mid-calculation, and share the exact frame with one link.

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What makes it a suanpan

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Seven beads a rod

Two heaven beads worth 5 and five earth beads worth 1, exactly as on a Ming-era frame. Every one of them moves.

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Rods that hold 15

The spare beads let a rod carry up to 15, so you can park an intermediate result instead of carrying straight away — the working style those beads were designed for.

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Shareable to the bead

The share link encodes the position of every bead, not just the number, so a parked frame arrives exactly as you left it.

How to use it

  1. 1

    Push beads toward the beam

    Drag a heaven bead down or an earth bead up to count it. Beads resting away from the middle beam are worth nothing; a rod value is the sum of the beads touching it.

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    Read each rod as a place

    The rightmost rod is ones, the next is tens, and so on. Turn on place labels if you want the columns named while you learn.

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    Carry when you are ready

    On a suanpan you may let a rod pass nine and settle up later. The running total above the frame stays correct throughout, so you can follow the arithmetic either way.

Suanpan or soroban?

The Japanese soroban is a direct descendant of this frame with the spare beads removed: one heaven bead and four earth beads, so every digit has exactly one bead pattern. That constraint is what makes it the instrument modern mental-arithmetic programs teach on, ours included.

The suanpan is the older and more flexible of the two. Its extra beads suited traditional Chinese weights and measures, which were not purely decimal, and they let a skilled operator delay a carry. Neither is better — they are tuned for different work.

Try the soroban abacus

Want it solved step by step?

Guide Me takes any equation and works it one bead at a time, naming the technique behind every move. It runs on the soroban frame, where each digit has a single bead pattern for the rules to describe.

Open Guide Me

Suanpan questions

What is a suanpan?
The suanpan is the Chinese abacus: a frame of rods carrying two beads above a horizontal beam, each worth 5, and five beads below it, each worth 1. Slide a bead toward the beam to count it. For centuries it was the standard calculating tool of merchants and clerks across East Asia.
How do I use this virtual suanpan?
Drag any bead toward the middle beam to count it, or away from the beam to clear it. On a computer you can also click a rod and then use the number keys, the arrow keys, or H to toggle a heaven bead. Reset clears the frame; Share copies a link to the exact bead layout.
Why can one rod show more than 9?
Because a suanpan rod really can. Two heaven beads and five earth beads add up to 15, and those spare beads are the whole point of the design — they let you hold an intermediate value on a rod and carry it later rather than immediately. A soroban, with one heaven and four earth beads, stops at 9 and has no such state.
Is the suanpan the same as a soroban?
No, though they are close relatives. The Japanese soroban descends from the suanpan with one heaven bead and one earth bead removed, giving a 1+4 rod where every digit has exactly one bead pattern. The suanpan keeps the 2+5 layout, so a value can be shown in more than one way. Both count in base 10.
Which one should my child learn?
For mental-arithmetic training, the soroban. Its one-pattern-per-digit rule is what lets a student picture the frame and calculate in their head — the skill called anzan. The Kani Math program teaches the soroban across nine levels. Use this suanpan to explore the older instrument and see where the method came from.

Learn the method behind the beads

The frame is the easy part. Kani Math turns it into a nine-level program of lessons, drills and competitions — free to start.

Open Kani Math →

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