> In China there are 1.2bn people spread over > 60 degrees of longitude all living by the > same clock time. > > Compared with their fellows in the easternmost > 15 degrees, the others are effectively living > with single, double and quadruple summer time.
This is technically true, but in practice, not an ideal test. First of all, the vast majority of people in China live in a longitude band of less than 30 degrees, running from Kunming in the west to Harbin in the East. Time is standardized around Beijing, which is close to the center of that range. I lived in Kunming for two years and I can't say that it was a problem living on Beijing time. However, when I traveled further west, to the frontier province of Xinjiang, Beijing time was noticeably out of sync with my expectations of when the sun "should" be shining. In Xinjiang, Beijing time is used for national schedules, such as train timetables and government office hours. For everything else, people use "local time," which is an hour earlier than Beijing time. People in Xinjiang are in the habit of ignoring many government dictates so keeping their own time is not a big challenge. The other major western province in China is Tibet. I haven't been to Tibet but I have no trouble imagining that, like Xinjiang, people ignore a lot of what the government mandates. Neither province is ethnically or historically part of the Chinese empire and traditions have more authority than law. Even in Kunming, a much more culturally Chinese area, people liked to quote the time-honored maxim that "the mountains are tall and the emperor is far away." Standardized time doesn't count for much when habits are involved. Much of China is still rural. It will be a long time before timepieces rule. John --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
