We can see the culture-based differences between tallying in Europe (where people use vertical lines, something like Roman numerals), and in Vietnam:
A different Chinese system for tallying relates writing and counting. There a tally is built by successively adding lines. When all five are present so is an ideograph for that word.

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A more sophisticated mathematical property involving combinations follows. It appears here in Chinese ideographs for numbers. The relationships shown in this image were known in China hundreds of years before "Pascal's triangle" appeared in the west .
The figure is from [1, p. 147, # 107].
Reference [1] gives many other inventions and mathematical notions that originated in China.

References

[1] Temple, Robert, The Genius of China - 3,000 years of science, discovery and invention, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1986.