Chinese timezones

[Oscar van Vlijmen]

> From: Jesper Norgaard Welen


> The cities in Xinjiang I could find lies in the upper and lower part of the
> region, while there is a central zone where I could not find any cities that
> coincided with astro.com, but this might also be because it is a big desert
> area. Many counties have a name that corresponds to the city name also, so I
> could often find it that way, but not for the following counties:
> 
> Awati  40.11 80.57
> Shaya  40.53 81.43
> Kuche  41.77 83.51
> Xinhe  41.34 82.13
> Baicheng  42.07 81.97
> Wensu  41.59 80.38
> Wushi  41.20 79.13
> Luntai  41.70 84.65
> Yuli  40.83 87.00
> Hejing  42.88 85.32
> 
> The coordinates above correspond to the approximate center of the county.
> I'm looking for cities near these county centers that would lie inside the
> county and exist in www.astro.com to produce a GMT offset for 1970. Can
> anyone help?


As is probably known the GeoNames database lists nearly every rock and creek
with a name on it.
http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/cntry_files.html
The China file is more than 20 MB large and has more than 160,000 entries.
If you're interested, I managed to extract all 961 names lying in the
rectangle with longitude 79-87 and latitude 39-44 deg.
The list contains several alternative spellings and codes with type of
location like populated place, main administrative division etcetera. The
codes are explained on pages, found at earth-info.nga.mil.
I can't say that a list with 960 names is a real help, but that's what I can
offer.