Pseudo Period Accurate Time Terms for Ancient China

One of my pet peeves for the CQL Netflix translations is their poor consistency with how they translate Shichen. I’ve seen it where half a shichen is one hour and half a shichen is half an hour. It gets CONFUSING for people! 

So I’m writing this as for my sanity. And just share some basic stuff I got either off Baidu or from reading too much Wuxia as a kid.

时辰 (shíchén) is two hours!! Each shichen has the same name as the single character chinese zodiac animals (This is known as dì|zhī,  地支or earthly branches): 

According to Baidu, pre-Tang, 子 is from 0000 to 0200 and so forth. 

And then starting sometime during Tang, 子 was from 2300 to 0100.  丑 from 0100 to 0300 and so on and so forth. 

I usually go with the 2300-0100 version.  But it doesn’t really matter, imo. 

Another term you’ll potentially come across is 更 (gēng). It is a way to record time specifically used at night.  The most common one you hear is san geng or third geng which is associated with midnight. 

Another thing I kept on wondering is how long is one stick of incense worth of time? It can’t be that long because i’ve burnt incense before! And it’s not that long! But it turns out, after much googling, it’s not a specific period of time. Some authors use it to describe 5 minutes and some for 30 minutes and everything in between. Alas. So you can choose what you want when writing fic but stay consistent! :) 

When people talk about birthdays in Wuxia, they will ask for the 8 characters of your birth (生辰八字). Year, Month, Day, Time are each represented by two characters. In addition to the dìzhī cycle, there is the heavenly roots (tiān|gān, 天干) cycle. In terms of zodiac years, tiāngān determines your element.These two cycles rotate to make 60 years which is called a 甲子 (Jiǎzǐ, jia is the first tiāngān and zi is the first  dìzhī). Months, days, and time are also defined by these characters -- all associated with elements, but I don’t actually know the calculations. 

There are 12 months in a lunar calendar year. Each month is either 29 or 30 days. The full moon falls on the 15th day +/- 1 day. Due to trying to keep the seasons from shifting, there are leap months. This is why the Lunar New Year is sometimes in Feb, moves slowly back into mid Jan, and then jumps to mid Feb again. They occur about 7 times every 19 years. 

One neat thing is farmers still need to know where on a solar calendar seasons land for crops. There are 24 节气 for that! Some holidays (e.g winter solstice and QingMingJie) are assigned by these. 

There are actually wikipedia articles about these topics that I know very little about! 

Since tumblr hates links, you can find wiki articles on: Chinese calendar, Four Pillars of Destiny (生辰八字), Solar term (节气 )

So read up and have fun! :) I am by no means knowledgeable but I figured directing people in the right direction will be helpful.