The Clock Is Not Really About Time

那座钟其实不是为了时间

A phone tells time more accurately. The tower still has a job.

手机报时更准。钟楼仍然有自己的工作。

To find the time now, the last thing anyone needs to do is look up. A phone, watch, car dashboard and computer all know it, and most will be more accurate than an old public clock. On efficiency alone, a clock tower lost years ago. It stands high above the street with four faces, in an age when nearly everybody already carries the time in a pocket.

But some things in a town deserve to remain without being the best tool for the job. Taiping Clock Tower stands on Jalan Kota. Reach that part of town and the building does more than show an hour. It turns an ordinary junction into a place that can be recognised and remembered. A clock face may tell the time, but the tower tells you where you are.

If the clock stopped one day, Taiping would not seize up. People would still check their phones, shops would open and traffic would continue. What would be missing is something much less measurable. A sentence such as “wait near the clock tower” would become harder to use. It is not as precise as a map pin, but towns are not held together only by coordinates.

Modern cities are very good at improving things. Signs are replaced, buildings are renovated and anything without an obvious function starts to look inefficient. Yet a little redundancy can be useful. Landmarks give a street reference points. They give memory somewhere to attach itself. A town made only from the newest and most efficient objects might work perfectly well and still be surprisingly difficult to remember.

There is another small virtue in a public clock. It makes time visible to everyone. The time on a phone belongs to one person and disappears when the screen goes dark. The time on a tower hangs over the street. Anyone passing can see it. Even if nobody depends on it to arrive at an appointment, it recalls an older idea that time could be displayed in a place shared by strangers.

So an old clock tower does not need to prove that it is more accurate than a phone. That is no longer its most important job. It only has to stay where it is and make one part of Taiping feel unlike any other street. That is enough work for a clock that no longer needs to win an argument about time.

Published 25 September 2026

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Source

Wikimedia Commons — Taiping Clock Tower, Lee Wen Peng, CC BY-SA 4.0

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