This is the most objective and accurate article I have found so far on the ancient units of time. Share!

At present, the day and night are 24 hours, and in ancient times it was 12 hours. When Western mechanical clocks were introduced to China, people called the Chinese and Western time points "big time" and "hour" respectively. With the popularization of clocks and watches, people forgot about the "big hour", and the "hour" is still used today.

In ancient times, the time (big time) was not counted by one, two, three, four, but with the son of the ugly Yin Mao as the mark, and with the rat, cow, tiger and rabbit and other animals as the substitute, thought it was easy to remember. The specific division is as follows:

The child (rat) is eleven to one o'clock, with twelve o'clock as the positive point;

When ugly (cow), it is one to three points, and two points are the positive point;

Yin (tiger) time is three o'clock to five o'clock, with four o'clock as the punctual point;

Mao (rabbit) time is five to seven o'clock, with six o'clock as the punctual point;

The time of Chen (dragon) is from seven to nine o'clock, with eight o'clock as the punctual point;

The time of the snake is from nine o'clock to eleven o'clock, with ten o'clock as the punctual point;

At noon (horse) is from eleven o'clock to one o'clock, with twelve o'clock as the punctual point;

When it is not (sheep), it is one point to three points, and two points are the positive points;

Shen (monkey) time is from 3 o'clock to 5 o'clock, with 4 o'clock as the punctual point;

It is from five o'clock to seven o'clock when it is unitary (chicken), with six o'clock as the punctual point;

戌 (dog) time is from 7 o'clock to 9 o'clock, with 8 o'clock as the punctual point;

The time of the pig is from nine to eleven o'clock, with ten o'clock as the punctual point.

The ancients said that the time is different from the night, the day said "bell", and the night said "more" or "drum". There is also the saying of "morning bell and dusk drum", in ancient times, the town set up more bell and drum towers, and hit the bell to tell the time in the morning (Chenshi, seven o'clock today), so it is said "what time is the clock" during the day; The dusk (unitary time, nineteen o'clock today) drum time, so the night is said to be a few drum days. At night, it is useful to say that the time is "more", which is due to the night watchman, who strikes the bongs while patrolling, and tells the time with points. The whole night is divided into five watches, and the third is the sub-hour, so there is also the saying of "three watches in the middle of the night".

The unit of measurement below the hour is the "quarter", and an hour is divided into eight quarters, each of which is equal to fifteen minutes at present. In the old novel, there is a saying that "the knife is cut at three quarters of noon", which means that at three quarters of an hour at noon (five minutes to noon), the yang energy is at its highest, and the yin energy dissipates immediately.

The following is engraved as "character", and the Cantonese-speaking areas of Guangxi in Guangdong and Guangxi are still used today, such as "3:10 in the afternoon", which means "15:50". According to the analysis of linguists, there are a lot of "ancient Chinese" preserved in the Cantonese language, and the reason for this is that the ancient Han people of the Central Plains were displaced in Lingnan and separated from the Central Plains people for a long time, and their language did not "keep pace with the times" with the people who stayed in the Central Plains. The division below the "character" is unknown, according to the Book of Sui

According to the Chronicles of the Law, seconds are ancient time units, and seconds below are "suddenly"; How to convert, the book does not say clearly, only says: "'Seconds' are as thin as mangs, and 'sudden' is like the thinnest spider silk."

In ancient times, there were two kinds of timekeeping tools, one was "sundial" and the other was "leak". Sundials are timed by the movement of the sun's shadow, corresponding to the scale on the sundial's face. Needless to say, sundials should have been seen in the Forbidden City and on the observatory in Beijing. The drain is timed by dripping water and is a combination of four copper kettles containing water, stacked on top of each other from top to bottom. There are small holes in the bottom of the upper three, and the bottom one is placed vertically with an arrow-shaped buoy, and the water surface rises with the dripping water, and there is a scale on the body of the pot to keep time. The original day and night were divided into 100 quarters, but because they could not be divided by the twelve hours, they were successively changed to 96, 108, and 120 ticks, and were officially set at 96 ticks in the Qing Dynasty; In this way, one hour is equal to eight quarters. One moment is divided into three quarters, and there are twenty-four minutes in one day and night, opposite to the twenty-four solar terms. Note that this is not the current minute, but the "word", which is engraved with two strange symbols between the two quarters, so it is called "word". The following words are divided by lines as thin as wheat mangs, which are called "seconds"; The second word is composed of "he" and "less", he refers to wheat he, and less refers to small mangs. It can't be drawn below the second, and it can only be said that it is "as thin as spider silk" to illustrate, which is called "suddenly"; For example, the word "suddenly" refers to a very short period of time, and then refers to a change, which means that there has been a change in a very short period of time.

There is such a record in the seventeenth volume of the "Maha Sangha Law": "A moment is a thought, twenty thoughts are a moment, twenty moments are a snap of a finger, twenty snaps of a finger is a pre-roll, twenty rays of a moment is a moment, and thirty moments is a day and night." ”

[Historical chronological system]: 12 periods of Yin Wuding time: daytime: Shu, Dan, Ming (big picking), Zhan, eclipse day (big eclipse), middle of the day, Zhan, small snack, small picking (first half);

Night: Xiaocai (the second half), Hui, (wood + fan), evening.

Yin Yu Xin to Wen Ding 16 paragraphs of time: day: Shu, Dan, Chao (Dacai), Shiri (Da Eclipse), Midday, Zhan, Guo Xi (Guo), Xiaoshi, Meng Xiaocai, Mo

Night: Meeting, dusk, (wood + fan), evening, sleep.

Qin 16 paragraph time: Pingdan, sunrise, eclipse, Mo food, east, day, west, day, feeding, market, dusk, people, midnight, rooster crow

Qin 12 paragraphs of time: that is, the twelve earthly branches: Yin, Mao, Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Xu, Hai, Zi, and Chou

In addition, the leaky pot commonly used in poetry, the method of instant leakage timekeeping, first appeared in the Western Han Dynasty, dividing a day and night into one hundred equal parts, also known as the hundred-hour system. The ratio of day to night is 40:60, and the opposite is true for winter and summer.

http://www.biquge.info

http://www.biquge.info

The starting point Chinese the http://www.biquge.info of the net

www.biquge.info welcome the majority of book friends to come and read, the latest, fastest, and hottest serialized works are all original at the starting point! For mobile phone users, please read it on m.biquge.info.