Mandarin Monday: Capitalized Chinese Characters? What the Hell are Those? Mar 1, 2021 2:30 pm | Add a comment | 419 reads Mandarin Monday is a weekly column where we help you improve your Chinese by detailing learning tips, fun and practical phrases, and trends. Capitalized Chinese? What is this, a March Fool's joke? Alright, so we're not talking about literal capitalization. This has nothing to do with beginning a sentence or proper nouns. Neither, however, are these special characters some Gen Z internet slang. In fact, you may already be familiar with them, assuming that this cashless society hasn't cut you off from banknotes entirely. We're talking about the numeric characters written by bankers of old in order to minimize forgeries. Altogether, these characters cover the numerals from one to ten, with a couple of extra units in the mix, specifically 100 and 1,000.