時辰 Shi Chen

[zonogon]

Im not sure what this means 時辰, I've done some reasearch on it and i came up with :

"It is a traditional Chinese hour equaling to two modern “small” hours."

and

"時辰 时辰 shíchén si4 san4 "2 hours" (ancient)"

I have to do a project on this topic but so far I've only found those two. Is there some traditional thing that goes with the topic? I'm still not sure what it means.

[Quest]

It's what it says in your research, 時辰 is the traditional Chinese hour equaling 2 western hours. There are 12 時辰s in one day.

[zonogon]

is there a significance to it? I have to make a 20 slide presentation on that haha

[Altair]

I think that is why the 12 地支 (Earthly Branches) can cover an entire day from 11 p.m. to 10:59 p.m. At least, that is what I read somewhere.

If you do the calculations, you can see why 午 (wu3), the seventh Earthly Branch ends up at noon.

[Quest]

Here's your 20 slides: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%B6%E8%BE%B0

[Chinapage]

For sub-divisions of a day into two-hour intervals, see

http://www.chinapage.com/astronomy/calendar/hour.html

[randall_flagg]

I guess because traditional Chinese hours used to be 120 minutes long, an hour now is call 小时 -- little hour, because it is only 60 minutes long.

[Chineseteacher]

时辰 is used in ancient China as a measure of time. 1 时辰 equals to 2 hours. A whole day(24 hours) can be divided into 12 时辰s, namely, 子zi3, 丑chou3, 寅yin2, 卯mao3 辰chen2 巳si4(attention: not 已yi3 or 己ji3) 午wu3 未wei4 申shen1 酉you4 戌xu1 亥hai4, and when talking about time, people ask "现在什么时辰?" meaning "what's the 时辰 it is now" , and the answer can be, say, 子时, this is between 11pm and 1am, so 丑时 means between 2am and 4am, and so on and so on.....

However, in modern times, we don't use 时辰 as a measure of time any more. but the word 时辰 is sometimes used to mean "time" , for example, people may still say "现在什么时辰了?" , but they mean "what time is it" rather than "what's the 时辰 it is ?" so the answer is "it's xx o'clock" but never "it's 子时, etc",

and another example:

趁能玩的时候多玩玩吧! 辛苦的时辰不久就会到的.

Have fun while you can. The hard time is just around the corner.