How to Type Chinese Yuan or Renminbi Symbol 元?

China follows unique system compared to western countries and the currency symbol is not an exception to that. In general, China uses Mandarin or Chinese within China and Pinyin for the outside world. With similar context, the currency symbol is a Chinese Yuan (元) within China while Japanese Yen is used as a Chinese currency symbol in western scripts. If you are looking for typing the Chinese Yuan or Yen symbols, here are the shortcuts for the same.

Chinese Currency Symbols

Below are the three names used for Chinese currency:

• Renminbi or RMB – renminbi literally means people’s currency indicated as RMB. This is the actual currency of China sharing the same Yen ¥ sign. In order to avoid confusion, some people also use CN¥ to differentiate from Japanese currency symbol Yen.
• Chinese Yuan or CNY – Yuan is a unit of RMB, however people use it interchangeably as currency with the symbol 元. CNY is also the international ISO code for currency of China.
• Kuai – this is an informal unit of RMB and kuài is what you will hear when you are inside China.

In summary, within Mainland China you will find the writings like 10元 and pronounced as ten kuai. You will never find people write 10¥ or 10 CNY or 10 RMB inside China. Below is the summary of the formal and informal currency with denominations.

	Formal	Informal
1 unit	Yuan	Kuai
1/10	Jiao	Mao
1/100	Fen	–

1 Yuan or Kuai = 10 Jiao or Mao = 100 Fen

Keyboard Shortcuts for Yuan and Yen Symbols

Since both Yuan and Yen are currency symbols for China, you can use the following alt code keyboard shortcuts to type the symbols in your documents.

Symbol Name	Yuan Sign 元	Yen Sign ¥
Windows Shortcut	Alt + 20803	Alt + 165
Mac Shortcut	Option + 5143	Option + 00A5
Word Shortcut	5143 Alt + X	00A5 Alt + X
HTML Entity Decimal	元	¥
HTML Entity Hexadecimal	元	¥
HTML Entity Name		¥
CSS Value	\5143;	\00A5;
Decimal	165	165
Hexadecimal	5143	00A5
Unicode Point	U+5143	U+00A5
Category	CJK Unified Ideographs	Currency Symbols

How to Type Chinese Yuan Symbol?

HTML Code for Yuan Sign

<span>&#20803;</span>
<span>&#x5143;</span>

CSS Code Example

li:before {
	content:\5143;
	font-family:Arial;
}

Chinese Currency Symbols Display

Below is how the Yuan and Yen symbols will look on the browser.

In Windows PC, you can customize the display of the symbol by applying background and changing font size. On Mac, you can use Character Viewer app to insert Yuan and Yen symbols with different font variation.

Yuan and Yen Signs in Unicode

Note that Yuan sign is categorized under CJK Unified Ideographs block in Unicode. This block has allocated code point from 4E00 to 9FFF containing more than 20K special characters used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. The symbols under this category does not have any specific name. Therefore, you can’t search for “yuan” in any Unicode chart / name list / table. Even on Mac Character Viewer, you have to search with the code value of 5143 to find the symbol.

Unlike Yuan sign, Yen is part of Unicode currency block that you can search with the name.