Number of Days
In the late Spring and Autumn Period (722–481 BC), the former Sifen calendar (古四分历) was established, and set the tropical year at 365.25 days, the same length as the Julian calendar which was introduced in 46 BC. The Taichu calendar (太初历) of 104 BC under Emperor Wu of Han rendered the tropical year at roughly the same (365 ).
Many other calendars were established between then and the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), including those established by Li Chunfeng (602–670) and Yi Xing (683–727). In 1281, the Yuan astronomer Guo Shoujing (1233–1316) fixed the calendar at 365.2425 days, the same as the Gregorian calendar established in 1582; this calendar, the Shoushi calendar (授時曆), would be used in China for the next 363 years. Guo Shoujing established the new calendar with the aid of his own achievements in spherical trigonometry, which he derived largely from the work of Shen Kuo (1031–1095) who established trigonometry in China.
Read more about this topic: Chinese Calendar
Famous quotes containing the words number of, number and/or days:
“He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, of men in distant countries, and in past times.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“... the spiritual world is here and now and indisputably and preeminently real. It is the material world that is the realm of shadows.”
—Amelia E. Barr, U.S. novelist. All the Days of My Life, ch. 1 (1913)