China Time

How the Ancient Chinese Kept Track of Hours, Days, Years and Epochs

By: Jeff Pepper

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Paperback | 15 September 2026

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From oracle bones and simple sundials to towering clockwork machines that rang gongs across imperial capitals, from time intervals ranging from a tenth of a second to over four thousand years, China has been measuring time since before the dawn of history. But the story of Chinese timekeeping is far more than a tale of ancient gadgets. It is a story about how a civilization understood the universe, and its place within it.

In China Time, best-selling author Jeff Pepper tells the story of the ingenious systems that have organized daily life in the Middle Kingdom. Discover how the Twelve Earthly Branches divide the day into periods heavy with symbolism, how night watchmen tracked the passage of time, how astronomers refined the day into ever-smaller increments, and how Buddhist thinkers imagined time in terms of fingersnaps and moments of thought.

You'll meet the people whose innovations shaped China's timekeeping and datekeeping, including the brilliant builders of huge towers whose complex clockworks transformed the analog flowing water into the first true digital "ticks" of measured time .

Along the way, you'll encounter emperors claiming the Mandate of Heaven, poets reflecting on the brevity of life, and philosophers wrestling with the shifting length of daylight and the puzzling movement of the planets across the sky. You'll see how calendars, constellations, lunar months, solar terms, and zodiac animals combined into a richly layered system shaping agriculture, government, religion, and everyday speech.

Clear, engaging, and accessible to readers with no background in Chinese language or history, China Time reveals how one of the world's oldest civilizations answered timeless questions: what time is it, what day is it, and what does it really mean?

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