Weeks to Shichen (wk to shichen)

1 week equals 84 shichen exactly.

1 week = 84 shichen

How to convert weeks to shichen

To convert weeks to shichen, multiply the number of weeks by 84. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply shichen by 0.0119047619 (rounded).

shichen = weeks × 84

Example: 10 weeks = 840 shichen.

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

Week (wk)

CalendarCurrent unit

Seven days. The seven-day week comes from the ancient Near East and is nearly universal in the modern calendar.

Nothing in the sky produces a seven-day cycle, which makes the week a human invention with a contested pedigree. Babylonians marked the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th of the lunar month as special, but that was not a continuous cycle. A continuous seven-day cycle tied to the Sabbath is attested in Judaism by the 6th century BC at the latest, and scholars disagree on whether it was borrowed from Babylon or developed independently. The Romans later used a week named for the Sun, the Moon and the five visible planets, and in AD 321 Emperor Constantine decreed it across the empire.

A week is seven days, or 604,800 seconds, and it divides evenly into neither months nor years, which is why calendars shift against it. The ISO 8601 standard starts each week on Monday and assigns week 1 to the week containing the year's first Thursday, so some years have a week 53. Other societies used different lengths: Rome had an eight-day market cycle, and revolutionary France used a ten-day week from 1793 to 1802. The English word comes from Old English wice, meaning a turn or succession.

1 week = 604,800 seconds (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Week; Wikipedia: ISO week date

Shichen (shichen)

ChineseHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

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

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