The Thai Rice Bucket and Tio

Tio is a piece of bamboo made smooth and shaped into a flat bar and used for counting the number of buckets of rice bought by a trader. It is about 38 centimeters long with a small tapering end and is placed on rice containers. The top is rounded and painted in red, white, yellow, or green to distinguish groups of workers.

In olden days, when owners of rice mills or traders bought paddy from farmers at their barns, they would scoop up rice by the measure and place Tio into the buckets in order to recognize them when they were counted. In this regards, when one hundred Tio were placed, the rice loading was made one hundred times.

One color might be used to represent one farmer group and his workers. A single loading comprised five buckets of rice (100 buckets were equivalent to 1,500 kilograms). When each group finished loading, the number of Tio would be counted, and workers in that group would receive the same wage based on the number of Tio involved.