What are the traditional time units in China?

Now the daily day and night is 24 hours, while in ancient times it was 12 hours. When western mechanical clocks and watches were introduced into China, people called the time points of China and the West "Da Shi" and "Shi Shi" respectively. With the popularity of clocks and watches, people forget "Da Shi", and "Shi" is still in use today.

In ancient times, time (big time) was not counted by 1234, but marked by ugly children and animals such as rats, cows, tigers and rabbits, which was easy to remember. The specific division is as follows: from eleven o'clock to one o'clock, twelve o'clock is the punctuality; Ugly (cattle) from one to three, with two points as the punctuality; Yin (tiger) is from three o'clock to five o'clock, with four o'clock as the punctuality; Mao (rabbit) is from five to seven, with six o'clock as the punctuality; Chen (Dragon) is from 7: 00 to 9: 00, with 8: 00 as the punctuality; It's 9 o'clock to 1 1, and 10 is the punctuality; At noon (horse), it is eleven o'clock to one o'clock, with twelve o'clock as the punctuality; When you are not (sheep), it is 1 until 3 o'clock, with 2 o'clock as the punctuality; When applying for (monkey), it is from three o'clock to five o'clock, with four o'clock as the punctuality; You (chicken) are from five to seven, with six o'clock as the punctuality; From 7: 00 to 9: 00, 8: 00 is the punctuality; Shanghai is now 9: 00 to 1 1 point (pig), and 10 is the punctuality.

The ancients said that time and day are different, saying "bell" during the day and "more" or "drum" at night. There is also the saying "the morning bell and the evening drum". In ancient times, there were many bell and drum towers in towns. Ring the bell in the morning (7 o'clock today), so say "what time" during the day; At dusk (today 19), drums are ringing, so the night is also called a few drum days. It is more useful to say time at night, because the night watchman beats the banger while patrolling and tells the time by counting. The whole night is divided into five classes, and the third class is midnight, so it is also called "midnight".

The unit of measurement below hours is "hours". One hour is divided into eight hours, and each hour is equal to fifteen minutes now. There is a saying in the old novel called "three cuts at noon", that is, at three minutes at noon (five minutes before noon), at this time, the yang is flourishing and the yin is instantly dissipated. This heinous crime should be "not even allowed to do ghosts" to show severe punishment.

The word "Zi" is engraved below. As for Zi, it is still used in Cantonese in Guangdong and Guangxi, such as "3: 10 pm", which means "15: 50". According to the analysis of linguists, there are a lot of "ancient Chinese" in Cantonese. The reason is that the Han people in the ancient Central Plains lived in Lingnan, separated from the Central Plains people for a long time, and their languages did not "keep pace with the times" with those who stayed in the Central Plains. The division under the word "zi" is unknown. According to Sui Shu's law, second is the ancient unit of time, and below second is "sudden"; How to convert, the book did not make it clear, only said: "'two' is as thin as a mountain; "Suddenly" is like the best spider silk. "

In ancient times, there were two kinds of timing tools, one was "sundial" and the other was "leakage". The sundial is timed according to the movement of the shadow, which corresponds to the scale on the surface of the sundial. Needless to say, you should have seen the sundial in the Forbidden City and the Observatory in Beijing. Water leakage is timed by dripping water, which is made up of four copper pots filled with water, which are stacked on top of each other. There are holes in the bottom of the first three, and an arrow-shaped buoy is vertically placed on the bottom one. The water level rises with the drop of water, and the pot body has scale timing. The original day and night was divided into 100 minutes, which was changed to 96, 108 and 120 minutes successively because it was not divisible with twelve o'clock, and it was officially set as 96 minutes in Qing Dynasty. In this way, one hour is equal to eight quarters. A moment is divided into three points, and a day and night has twenty-four points, as opposed to twenty-four solar terms. Note that this minute is not the current minute, but a word. Between two moments, two strange symbols are engraved, so it is called "word". The bottom of the word is divided by lines as thin as wheat awns, which is called "second"; The word "two" consists of "he" and "Shao", where he refers to wheat and Shao refers to tiny awns. You can't row below seconds, you can only say "as thin as spider silk", which is called "suddenly"; For example, the word "suddenly" suddenly refers to a very short time, but it refers to change, which means change in a very short time.