Hours of The Day
Under the traditional system of hour-marking, each day is divided into 12 units (時辰). Each of these units is equivalent to two hours of international time. Each is named after one of the 12 Earthly Branches. The first unit, Hour of Zi (子時), begins at 11 p.m. of the previous day and ends at 1 a.m. Traditionally, executions of condemned prisoners occur at the midpoint of Hour of Wu (正午時), i.e., noon.
A second system subdivided the day into 100 equal parts, ke, each of which equalling 14.4 minutes or about one quarter of a standard Western hour. This was used for centuries, making the Chinese first to apply decimal time – long before the French Republican Calendar. However, because 100 could not be divided equally into the 12 "double hours", the system was changed to variously 96, 108, and 120 ke in a day. During the Qing Dynasty, the number was officially settled at 96, making each ke exactly a quarter of a Western hour. Today, ke is often used to refer to a quarter of an hour.
Read more about this topic: Chinese Calendar
Famous quotes containing the words hours of, hours and/or day:
“O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All day long the machine waits: rooms,
stairs, carpets, furniture, people
those people who stand at the open windows like objects
waiting to topple.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)