More Fun with Time Zones

Yesterday I discussed the curious shifting of time zones in Russia, which have been rearranged twice in the last five years.

Russia is not the only country with unusual time arrangements in Asia, however -- not by a long shot.

China

 The big outlier, as you can see below is China, which is broader than the continental United States and has one time zone.  This of course is known as Beijing time.

(One way to think of this is to compare China with Russia:  Russia has one time zone for every 508 miles while China has one time zone for its 3,123-mile breadth.)

This was not always so.  Starting in 1912, China had five time zones running from 5.5 to 8.5 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, known now as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC.)

This was changed in 1949 when the Peoples Republic of China was established.  The reason given was a political one:  unity.

Unfortunately the earth's rotation did not adjust in response.  As a result the sun rises around 10 a.m. in the far west of China, and what we would call high noon actually occurs at about 3 p.m.  Farmers and shopkeepers seem to operate on informal different times, and the Uighur people are said to hold to their own time schedule, most likely for their own political reasons.

Interestingly, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan also operate on Beijing time, 8+UTC.  Each calls its time setting and administration by a different name -- Hong Kong Time, Macau Standard Time and National Standard Time, respectively -- probably for political reasons as well.

India

Like China, India adopted a single time zone, UTC+5.30, shortly after its independence in 1948.  

Also like China, India is a broad country.  People in different regions had their own ideas.  Kolkota and Mumbai (then Calcutta and Bombay), for instance, waited several years before signing up for India Central Time.

And this year, after several decades of agitation, the state of Assam in India's far northeast adopted its own time zone, UTC+6.5, one hour earlier.  

An Assam leader explained that the new time zone would make his people more energetic.  This puzzles me.  The number of hours each day did not change; why would the numbers on the face of the clock make any difference in personal energy?

Another strange thing:  Nepal, that tiny pinkish country approaching India's northern cap from the east, declared its own time zone in 1956.  Nepal is much smaller than one-zone India, but it chose to set its clocks 15 minutes earlier than Indian ones.  It has been explained that the setting is based on the longitudinal location of a mountain set almost perfectly in Nepal's center and therefore is the perfect time.

What a funny place Asia is.  Enormous  countries with 3,000-mile politically drawn time zones and one tiny country so devoted to geographical precision that it insists on setting a time 15 minutes different from that of its neighbors.

The Americas

Given the variety of time arrangements in Asian, the Western Hemisphere seems like an oasis of regularity.  But there is at least one amusing exception:  Venezuela.

Venezuela is the striped country in the north of South America on the map below.  It does not set its time based on an hourly distance from UTC but instead makes a half-hour distinction.  This is almost unheard of in the Americas.

This innovation came in 2007, courtesy of the late president, Hugo Chavez.  He set the time zone a half hour east, completely at odds with those of all Venezuela's neighbors.

Wags at the time speculated that Chavez did not want to share even a time zone with the despised United States, and there may be something to it.  

Perhaps in the service of socialismo, Chavez maintained that an earlier sunrise would help schoolchildren arrive for class each day with more energy.  No explanation why the schools couldn't just open a half hour later.

There was some resistance from other countries, but Chavez was a difficult fellow even on his best days.  Maybe the opposition decided it just wasn't worth the bother.

End

Below is a map laying out the longitude of time zones.  When they cross water, they often run straight, but land interrupts them all over the world.  So time is a fixed thing, except when countries decide it isn't.