千qiān

Simplified Chinese (簡體). 千 (qiān, "thousand") appears unchanged from its traditional form, yet its pictographic origins tell a different story — the ancient shape depicted a person with bent back, perhaps bearing a burden, before being borrowed for its phonetic value to mean "thousand." Today it appears in compounds like 千万 (ten million), 千年 (a millennium) and 千米 (kilometer), proving that even a character which looks simple carries three thousand years on its shoulders.