[tz] China time zones 1949 - 1980: appeal to speakers of Mandarin

Alois Treindl alois at astro.ch
Wed Mar 12 23:31:53 UTC 2014


Thank you, this is an excellent website with valuable resources.
It also holds complete flight tables for 1963.

The 1956 document says 'all flight times in Peking time'. The 1963 
tables say 'flight times in local time'. By comparing routes in both 
directions one can deduce that no timezones are crossed within China. 
The duration of flights between pairs of cities inside China is the same 
in both directions.

This seems to establish that in 1956 and in 1963 there was a unified 
timezone in China, i.e. Beijing time.

I hope that we can collect more supportive evidence, and details about 
the introduction date of Beijing time in the the various parts of the 
country soon after the foundation of the People's Republic.

It is already evident that the TZ database will need an update. I hope 
TZ will keep the various zones, as they describe important differences 
before 1949, when time zones existed. It would be sad to loose this 
information only because after 1970 the country appears under a single zone.

On 12.03.14 18:39, Sanjeev Gupta wrote:

>
> I refer to: http://www.timetableimages.com/ttimages/complete/caac56/
> <http://bit.ly/1nMKS46> , which has clean scans of the Civil Aviation
> Administration of China's 1956 timetable.  As far as I can make out from
> calculating flight times, all places in China that CAAC flew to had the
> same timezone.
>


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