Shichen to Days (shichen to d)
1 shichen equals 0.08333333333 days (rounded).
How to convert shichen to days
To convert shichen to days, multiply the number of shichen by 0.08333333333. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply days by 12.
days = shichen × 0.08333333333
Example: 10 shichen = 0.8333333333 days.
Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.
About these units
Shichen (shichen)
The traditional Chinese 'double hour': two hours, twelve per day, each named after an animal of the zodiac.
Chinese clocks did not always count 24 hours. Since the Han dynasty the day has been divided into twelve periods named after the Earthly Branches, each lasting two hours and called a shichen. The first, zi, runs from 23:00 to 01:00 and is linked to the rat, followed by ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. The animal marks the centre of its period, so the horse sits at noon.
The animals were a practical shorthand, since the branch characters were easy to confuse, as the Eastern Han scholar Xu Shen noted. A Sui dynasty Buddhist text even gave each shichen three animals, one for morning, midday and evening. In the figure used here a shichen is exactly one twelfth of a day, or 7,200 seconds. The same twelve branches also name the years of the zodiac cycle.
1 shichen = 7,200 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Chinese zodiac; Wikipedia: Chinese units of measurement
Day (d)
24 hours or 86,400 seconds. The mean solar day; the actual rotation of the Earth is about 4 minutes shorter (see sidereal day).
Old English dæg is the root of our day, with close cousins in German Tag, Dutch dag and Icelandic dagur, all descending from Proto-Germanic dagaz. It is the oldest unit here, because the cycle of light and dark needs no instrument. Yet the day we count is a constructed average: the actual interval from one noon to the next varies through the year by up to about 7.9 seconds, because Earth's orbit is elliptical and its axis is tilted.
Astronomers smooth this out with a fictitious mean Sun, giving the mean solar day, and the day in the SI sense is fixed at exactly 86,400 seconds. Reality has drifted slightly: the mean solar day has recently averaged about 86,400.002 seconds, and tidal drag from the Moon is lengthening it by about 2 milliseconds per century. That is why 27 leap seconds were added to UTC between 1972 and 2022. One rotation measured against the distant stars is shorter, about 23 hours 56 minutes 4.09 seconds, and a year contains one more of these sidereal days than solar days.
1 day = 86,400 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Day; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition
Related conversions
- Days to shichen (reverse)
- Shichen to seconds
- Shichen to minutes
- Shichen to hours
- Shichen to weeks
- Shichen to months
- Shichen to years
- Seconds to days
- Minutes to days
- Hours to days
- Weeks to days
- Months to days
- Years to days
- Milliseconds to days
- Microseconds to days
- Nanoseconds to days
- Decades to days
- Centuries to days
- Millennia to days
See all time units.