North Korean officials announced recently that the country is creating its own time zone, moving back 30 minutes this weekend. The establishment of “Pyongyang time” is a political move intended to erase the legacy of Japanese colonial rule a century ago. Before that, the entire Korean peninsula was 8½ hours ahead of GMT, the time that North Korea will now revert to.
Here is a look at ways in which countries have changed their time zones for political reasons:
How it all began
Time zones were first proposed in the mid-19th century as global travel and communication gathered pace. But it wasn’t until the early 20th century that time zones were standardized with reference to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), after the meridian that runs through an observatory in the London borough of Greenwich. Most countries now use hourly offsets from GMT, but some large countries use multiple time zones while some small ones use fractions of an hour that more closely reflect the passage of the sun in their territory.
Great leap backward
China, a vast nation stretching almost3,100 miles from one end to the other, used to have five time zones. After taking power in 1949, the Communist Party abolished all except “Beijing time” (GMT +8) to simplify governance and to bring cohesion to the diverse nation. The decision has created problems for those living in the country’s west, particularly Tibet and Xinjiang, whose residents rise two hours earlier than they naturally would to be in synch with the east. Some residents set their clocks back by two hours to reflect actual conditions, an unofficial practice sometimes interpreted as disloyalty to Beijing.
15 minutes of fame
In 1956 Nepal moved to GMT +5:45 to mark the time the sun passes over a famous mountain, becoming one of only three places to have the quarter-hour offset. Proposals to adopt the same time zone as neighboring India (GMT +5:30), which surrounds Nepal on three sides, have gone nowhere.
Tea time
Stretching 1,800 miles from east to west, India has long struggled to reconcile itself to clocks. India was divided into two time zones for most of its history as a British colony, then chose a unified time zone upon independence. But some in the country’s far east still go their own way. In Assam state, home to much of India’s tea industry, many plantations work on what they call chaibagaan, or “tea garden time”: Clocks are set one hour ahead so field hands have more sunlight.
