IUBio

Time Magazine: Man of the Millennium

Bernd Paysan bernd.paysan at gmx.de
Fri Sep 25 17:56:28 EST 1998


Peter da Silva wrote:
> And of course if your candidate hadn't existed we wouldn't be thinking
> about milleniums right now at all. How's the chinese calendar laid out
> anyway?

The old chinese calendar is a horrible messy moon calendar, and got out
of sync of the moon long time ago. In 1644 a missionary helped to create
a reformed calendar (go back in sync with the moon), which was in use
until this century (still in use for religious/ceremonical dates). The
calendar has cycles and "centuries" with a duration of 60 years
(comprising of 5 times 12 years of the zodiac cycle). We are today
(26sep1998) in cycle 78, year 15, month 8, day 6. Use emacs calendar
mode to convert chinese dates into our dates or vice versa. Unlike the
hebrew or ethiopic calendar (which go back to the respective "beginning
of the world"), the start date actually is a real date - it refers to
the year when the calendar was introduced.

The event mentioned by Tony Griffiths was about 10 cycles ago, and it
not only marked the change from the mongolean dynasty to the Ming
dynasty, but also a change of power from the eunuchs to the civil
servants. No wonder China turned into a self-centered, self-containing
empire (thing of your average civil servant). It's also interesting to
note that the (last) expedition that went as far as Africa back then did
not intent to conquer the states they find, because there was absolutely
nothing interesting for China there (they only demanded symbolic
tributes). China had everything, more, and better. They did not even
find a reason why to trade with the more westward countries. Terry
Pratchett puts the situation in one of his disk world books: "you have
nothing we are interested in, we have nothing you can afford".

-- 
Bernd Paysan
"Late answers are wrong answers!"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/



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