FW: About China time zones

Walter Korte Walter.Korte at tomtom.com
Mon Sep 27 03:35:33 UTC 2010


Hi Paul,

Thank you for your reply; I have included a few people in cc that are
involved with the TimeZone database on the TomTom side.

We do not have a reliable source on the Xinjiang timezone so it is
probably best to keep it the way it is now. My remark was based on:

"While you are visiting Xinjiang, it is important to be aware of the
time zone being used. Although officially run on Beijing time, Xinjiang
people also use their own system. If Beijing time is used it means that
the sun doesn't raise until 9am and it is still light at midnight in the
summer months."
(from http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/xinjiang/)

>From an internal discussion:
"Our TomTom navigation engine uses the zoneinfo library and it doesn't
have a record with a "Beijing" city name. We can add it ourselves, but
we need to be aware that if we add "Asia/Beijing", we no longer use the
official time zone name from zoneinfo and we can't use the zoneinfo lib
anymore to find out time zone information from time zone name."

This is the main reason we would like to ask whether it is possible to
add a Asia/Beijing entry to the database. Probably TZ='Asia/Beijing'
will not work for us as we only use what is in the database.

Best regards,

Walter Korte


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU] 
Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2010 1:27 AM
To: Walter Korte
Cc: tz at elsie.nci.nih.gov
Subject: Re: FW: About China time zones

> 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?





More information about the tz mailing list