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 the, hours of, hours and/or day:
“A baby nurse is one that changes diapers and loves ‘em dearly. Get up at all hours of the night to give ‘em the bottle and change their pants. If the baby coughs or cries, you have to find out the need. I had my own room usually, but I slept in the same room with the baby. I would take full charge. It was twenty-four hours. I used to have one day a week off and I’d go home and see my own two little ones.”
—Ruth Lindstrom (c. 1892–?)
“I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.”
—John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937)
“Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
“The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)