About China time zones

Paul Koning paul_koning at Dell.com
Fri Sep 24 18:08:41 UTC 2010


I remember a discussion on this weird topic a few months ago -- as I recall, the issue is that the same location has two time zones, depending on the ethnic background of the people involved.  So there ended up being two names for the place, describing two rules.  And the two names are the names for the place in the two languages that are used there.

Then again, it looks like the final result wasn't two rules, but just a pile of comments in the "asia" rule sourcefile, and only the "PRC" rule is actually a live rule.

	paul

On Sep 24, 2010, at 1:27 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:

>> From: Walter Korte [mailto:Walter.Korte at tomtom.com] 
>> Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 11:15
> 
>> Neither Harbin, Shanghai nor Chungking (this is a very strange
>> spelling, it is spelled Chongqing in Pinyin) is used in China to
>> indicate a time zone.
> 
> This is the same as the US.  People in the US also do not say "Denver"
> or "Chicago" to denote a time zone.  City names like "Denver" (and
> "Harbin") are needed only for proper support of older time stamps,
> back when different regions of the country used different rules.
> 
> China is similar.  If users don't care about old time stamps,
> they can simply set TZ='Asia/Beijing'.
> 
>> in practice Xinjiang uses its own time zone so keeping these would be better.
> 
> Ouch.  The time zone database says that Xinjiang currently
> uses the same time zone as Beijing in practice.  So anyone who sets
> TZ='Asia/Urumqi' will get Beijing time for current time stamps.  Do
> you know of a reliable source on this topic?
> 





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