Time, days and dates

Time is 时间 shíjiān: 时 “the moment” + 间 “the interval” ⟶ time, the kind that passes as well as the kind you have to spare. The traditional form of 时 is 時, with the sun 日 on the left: people first read the time in the sky. This page keeps to what can be read on a watch and on a calendar: the time, the days, the week, the months, dates. The seasons are on the page The weather, age and birthdays on The ages of life. Duration, frequency and the lunar calendar will have their own page.

English already separates what Chinese separates: “o’clock” for the time on the dial, “hour” for the time that lasts. The time it is is 点 diǎn, literally “the point”: 三点 sān diǎn, it is three o’clock. The hour that lasts is 小时 xiǎoshí: 三个小时 sān ge xiǎoshí, for three hours. Chinese goes one step further and splits the minute as well, 分 fēn on the dial and 分钟 fēnzhōng for duration. 小时 means “small hour”, and that is not a figure of speech: the Chinese hour of former times, 时辰 shíchen, was worth two of ours (sentence 20). When Western clocks arrived, their hour was the small one. As for 点, the word is generally traced to the strokes sounded during the night watches, but I am not 100% sure of it.

The quarter of an hour, 刻 kè, is a “notch”: the one cut into the rod of the water clock. There were a hundred of them a day, a little under a quarter of an hour each; the count went to ninety-six under the Qing, with the Jesuits’ clocks, and since then the 刻 has been worth exactly fifteen minutes. People say 三点一刻 sān diǎn yí kè and 三点三刻 sān diǎn sān kè, but never “two quarters”: that is 三点半 sān diǎn bàn. For “to”, you first announce what is missing: 差五分九点 chà wǔ fēn jiǔ diǎn, literally “five minutes are lacking to nine o’clock” (sentence 9).

The day is organised around 午 wǔ, the middle of the day: 上午 shàngwǔ “above noon” ⟶ the morning, 下午 xiàwǔ “below noon” ⟶ the afternoon. Be careful: the English “morning” covers two words. 早上 zǎoshang is the start of the day, until eight or nine o’clock; 上午 runs until noon. And “three in the morning” is said with neither of them, but with 凌晨 língchén. The border between 早上 and 上午 is not fixed (it shifts from person to person, and a little from region to region). As for 午休 wǔxiū, the midday break, it is taken seriously: in many schools and offices, people sleep.

Days are counted from 今天 jīntiān. The day after tomorrow is 后天 hòutiān, “the day behind”, and the day before yesterday 前天 qiántiān, “the day in front”. This is rather disconcerting for an English speaker, who puts the future in front. The usual explanation is that we look at the past, since we know it, and that the future comes up behind our back. I do not know what it is worth, but it helps you remember. Time also flows from top to bottom: 上个星期 shàng ge xīngqī, the week “above”, is last week, and 下个星期 xià ge xīngqī is next week.

The seven-day week is an import. Its name, 星期 xīngqī, means “period of the heavenly bodies”: the Sun, the Moon and the five planets, which still give the days their names in Japanese (as they do for our Sunday, Monday and Saturday). Chinese preferred to number them: 星期一 xīngqīyī Monday, 星期二 xīngqī’èr Tuesday, up to 星期六 xīngqīliù Saturday. There is no “day seven”: Sunday is 星期天 xīngqītiān or 星期日 xīngqīrì. Two other series run alongside this one. 礼拜 lǐbài, “worship”, comes from the missionaries and is still very common in speech; 周 zhōu, “the cycle”, is more written (周一 zhōuyī, 周末 zhōumò). All three are understood everywhere. Before the week, the month was cut into three periods of ten days, and what remains of them is 上旬 shàngxún, 中旬 zhōngxún and 下旬 xiàxún, which you read every day in the press.

The months have no name, only a number: 一月 yīyuè January, 十月 shíyuè October. Take care not to confuse 一月, January, with 一个月 yí ge yuè, one month. The date goes from the largest to the smallest, 年月日 nián-yuè-rì: the year, then the month, then the day. The day of the month is 号 hào in speech and is written 日 rì. The year is read digit by digit, 一九九八年 yī jiǔ jiǔ bā nián (sentence 12), and decades are counted in 年代 niándài: 八十年代 bāshí niándài, the eighties.

The whole of China lives on 北京时间 Běijīng shíjiān, Beijing time (sentence 19). Yet the country stretches across five time zones, and it officially had five before 1949. In Xinjiang, in winter, the sun rises at about ten by the clock; a local time, two hours apart, runs in parallel there, and it is better to ask which one is meant when arranging to meet. Office hours, for their part, fit into four characters: 朝九晚五 zhāo jiǔ wǎn wǔ, “morning nine, evening five” (sentence 22). The weekends that are moved to make up a week’s holiday are on the page Festivals.

Two lines from the Tang close the list. Zhang Ji’s lets us hear the midnight bell of Hanshan Temple, in Suzhou (sentence 23); as early as the Song he was criticised on the grounds that a temple does not ring at that hour, and the quarrel kept the scholars busy for a good while. Li Shangyin’s looks at the setting sun (sentence 24). The last sentence is by Confucius: whoever has understood the Way in the morning may die in the evening (sentence 25, see Chapter 4 of the Analects of Confucius). Morning is written 朝 zhāo there and evening 夕 xī, two words of the classical language that turn up again in 朝九晚五 and in 夕阳 xīyáng. Nothing to do with a timetable.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order appears stroke by stroke, with the arrow showing the direction of the line.