This paper deals with the study of residuals of astronomical time and latitude observations since 1966 at the astronomical observatories of Peking, Tientsin, Tokyo (Japan), Mizusawa (Japan) and Belgrade (Yugoslavia). It is found that 3-5 months before a major earthquake, there appears always a pair of anomalies (opposite in signs) in time residuals and an isolated peak in the latitude residuals. These characteristic anomalies before earthquakes have very rarely been observed at those observatories in the vi...