相传,在商朝,有位名叫万年的年轻人,因为当时的节令很杂乱,他就有了把节令定准的想法,但一直苦于没有计算时间的好方法。一天,他坐在树荫下休息,树影的移动规律给了他启发,他由此设计出了一个测日影计天时的晷(ɡuǐ)仪。后来,他又根据山崖上滴泉的原理,制作了一个漏壶,来测定一天的时间。有了晷仪和漏壶,他发现,每隔三百六十多天,四季就轮回一次,天时的长短就重复一遍。 According to legend, in the Shang dynasty, a young man named Wan Nian, because of the festivals and disorderly at the time, had the idea of ​​determining the festivals, but he had been suffering from no method of calculating time. One day, he was resting in the shade and inspired him by the law of movement of tree shades. From there he designed a device to measure the daytime weather. Later, he also based on the principle of the drip on the cliff, made a leak pot, to determine the time of day. With the Mi instrument and the leak pot, he found that every three hundred and sixty days, the four seasons on a reincarnation, the length of time to repeat it.