A field 田 planted squarely on a mound of earth 土: together they drew the oldest unit of settled land in the farming kingdom, a hamlet with its fields around it — which is why 里 still measures distance too, as the traditional "Chinese mile" between one village and the next. The character's other common meaning, "inside", is a newer neighbor: when Chinese simplified its script in the 1950s, 里 was pressed into service as the stand-in for 裏/裡, a separate, unrelated character (clothing 衣 wrapped around a phonetic 里) that had long meant "the inner lining, the inside".
A piece of culture
The wall of ten thousand li The Great Wall's full Chinese name is 万里长城, "the ten-thousand-li long wall" — using the village-and-distance sense of this character. No one ever paced out exactly ten thousand of them; in Chinese, 万 (ten thousand) is shorthand for "countless", so the name simply boasts a wall beyond counting. The character's other job, "inside", rides on that borrowed sense instead: 这里 (zhèlǐ), "here", and 那里 (nàlǐ), "there" — literally "this place" and "that place" — inherited their 里 from the now-retired 裏/裡 when the script was simplified.
Use it in a real word
田里
tiánlǐ · tin4 lei5
in the field — literally "field-inside"; you already know 田