[tz] Traditional Chinese Time

Phake Nick c933103 at gmail.com
Thu Sep 13 07:11:52 UTC 2018


After reading the discussion about time around Ethiopian area, I am
reminded that there is actually another clock that is in use for
Chinese-speaking area [and maybe also some other neighboring region].
The system, nowadays mostly used in traditional customary/religious
activity only, would divide a day into 12 "double hours" (it seems to be a
common English translation for the original Chinese term), and then assign
each double hour a name from "Earthly Branch".
The tricky thing here is, the first hour "zi" actually start at 11 o'clock
(pm) standard time. And so everyday start and end at 23:00 according to
this system [However, note that some have suggested changing the system, so
that despite the 'zi' hour still represent the time period between 11pm and
1am, in some's mind it would be broken into a 'early zi' hour that belong
to the previous day while the second half of the hour would be treated as a
'late zi' hour that belongs to the second day]. Also, according to old
calendar books, DST are not observed for the traditional timing system, so
the "zi" hour would start at DST 24:00 if there's a DST. And then, nowadays
there are people who directly use time that are keep officially according
to timezone rules to convert time into this traditional system, however
there are also people who use the local solar time instead.
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