With the alarm clock ringing in the morning, people start the day's work and life in an orderly manner, and in the morning, afternoon, and evening after that, they will complete a certain task according to the time arrangement made in advance.
Please note that the key here is "time", which is not only a term for us modern people to simply record the changes of time, but also a "benchmark" for all activities in life.
So have you ever thought of a question, ancient science and technology is not developed, people do not have watches, mobile phones and other tools to timekeeping, time viewing, so how did the ancients grasp the changes in time in work and life?
Image: Stills of the alarm clock ringing in the morning
First, people's early understanding of time
1. The importance of bell and drum towers
Before the popularization of clocks and watches, the ancients also had their own tools or institutional institutions to calculate time changes, such as the bell and drum towers that would be found in ancient cities and cities.
According to historical records, as early as the Han Dynasty, there was a clear system of bell and drum towers announcing the time, but the early bell and drum towers were not in the folk, but in the deep palace garden, in other words, they only served the royal family.
In the Tang Dynasty, the bell and drum tower chimes were more accurate, and there were different forms of time telling methods in the morning and evening, such as the idiom "morning bell and twilight drum" is how it came, that is, the bell would ring in the morning to announce the time, and the drum would be beaten at night.
When the drums sounded, it meant that the strict curfew had begun, and at this time no one was allowed to wander around the streets, and once they were seen by the patrols of the government, they would suffer greatly.
Similarly, when the bells of the Bell and Drum Tower ring in the morning, the long curfew is lifted, merchants can sell their products at stalls, and people can freely go to the streets.
Photo: Stills of the Bell and Drum Towers during the Tang Dynasty
So if you try to cross to the Tang Dynasty, you must remember to deal with everything during the day, remember not to consider what "night life", otherwise you may lose your life, in the historical data of the Tang Dynasty, there are really examples of being killed because of drunken delays in curfew.
If you accidentally crossed over to the Song Dynasty, you don't have to worry at all, because the Song Dynasty did not set a curfew, which is inseparable from the unprecedented prosperity of the Song Dynasty's urban economy.
In our modern parlance, the Song people are basically "night owls", they linger in various places at night to play a dashing, but no one cares to know what time it is at this moment, so who will tell the time?
Basically, they are some monastic monks, who will carry a unique iron plate or their own wooden fish and other tools, and walk along the main road of the city to tell everyone the time.
Image: Monk knocking on a wooden fish still
2. The continuation and popularization of future generations
The ancients habitually divided the evening time into "five more", which will be announced once every time, which is the "beating change" that we often see in costume dramas.
The person in charge of the change also has to work part-time as a "weather forecaster" at dawn to tell everyone how the weather changed that day, and to be honest, this service is still very intimate.
After the Song Dynasty, the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, the development of urban civilization went further, at this time not only in the imperial city, the capital city has a bell and drum tower, other major cities in the Central Plains have also been set up, such as the Xi'an Bell and Drum Tower we are familiar with, many friends will think that this is the heritage of the Tang Dynasty, in fact, it was built in the Ming Dynasty.
Image: Playing more chime stills
Second, the ways and methods of the ancients calculated time
1. The great wisdom of the ancients
Since the Bell and Drum Tower is of great significance to people's work and life, how did the ancients speculate on time? Dahui consulted a lot of information and found that the ancients speculated on time simply by observing the changes in the sun.
In the Zhou Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago, the ancients developed a tool for measuring time - sundial. This tool can use the shadow and direction refracted by the sun in different positions in the sky to judge and speculate on the specific time, so the ancients said that time is "time", and the "one inch of time" that we are familiar with actually refers to an inch of shadow on the sundial.
The sundial divides the time of a day and night into twelve hours, each hour is equivalent to our modern 2 hours, the smallest unit of scale in the sundial is equivalent to 15 minutes on the clock, and the "one quarter of an hour" in the ancient population came from this. Measured in this unit, a day in ancient times was 12 hours, and each hour contained eight quarters of an hour.
Image: Sundial timing stills
Although the sundial is the embodiment of the great wisdom of the ancient working people, it also has obvious "shortcomings", that is, it is not useful at night or when the weather is bad.
Of course, do you think this will stump our forefathers? Of course not! Before long, the timekeeping tool, completely unaffected by the weather, the missing moment, turned out to be out of the blue.
Leaking is to fill a copper pot with a certain amount of water, and then let it leak out slowly, people will judge the time by the amount of water leaked, so this tool is also called "copper pot drip".
There is also a problem with this early tool, which is explained by physics that the difference in water level will form a completely different pressure difference in the pot, when the water level is high, the water will leak faster, and when the water level is lower, the water will leak slowly, which will cause a huge difference in time calculation.
Image: Stills of the copper pot drip timer
2. Other timing methods
During the Eastern Han Dynasty, the famous ancient scientist Zhang Heng improved the leakage engraving and designed it as a "secondary pot", in short, that is, to add a leaky pot to it, so that the height of the water became smaller, the speed was more uniform when flowing, and the error in time calculation was greatly reduced.
Later dynasties also followed this method, and even with the continuous progress of science and technology, there were more accurate "four-level leaky pots" in the Song and Yuan dynasties.
In addition, in ancient times, there was a simpler way to keep time, that is, to burn incense. When we watch martial arts dramas on TV, we often hear that the time of the duel between the masters is often "a burning incense", which is the specific performance of the incense timing.
The incense used to calculate time in ancient times was "dedicated", called more incense, which means "time scale". This incense is made of a special wood that burns evenly, and is also inlaid with metal beads, which will fall when it is burned to a certain extent, reminding people that the time has come.
Image: Stills of the incense timing
According to records, this incense appeared in the Song Dynasty and spread overseas, and foreigners were greatly shocked by it at that time. Even if the Western clock appeared later, the calculation time was more accurate, but for the vast majority of ordinary people in China, it is obviously more cost-effective to choose to burn incense.
Article author: Dahui
The entire graphic was produced by the team of the Big Cafe Say History Studio!