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
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