Prayer beads doubled as a counterSourced
A hundred beads helped count a survey journey
Nineteenth-century surveyor Nain Singh and colleagues trained for British expeditions to Tibet. A prayer-bead string was altered from the usual 108 beads to 100. Moving one bead every hundred paces helped count steps while disguising the survey work.
Distance calculations accumulated one bead at a time.
Summary / translation: Unbubly · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Nain Singh · Wikimedia contributors
Adapted, summarized and translated from the source. Adapted text is also available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Reviewed: 2026-10-05