Mondo Knows Facts
China keeps one clock across five time zones
Official time in Beijing applies from the eastern coast to Xinjiang, nearly 5,000 kilometres west Before 1949 the country used five zones, and traces of them survive in local practice. In western Xinjiang, people often keep their own unofficial time about two hours behind Beijing. The result is that sunrise in Kashgar can arrive around ten in the morning by the official clock. It sits in Mondo's world geography collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
Go further
More facts like this
Nepal's clock runs 45 minutes off the hourIts offset of five hours and 45 minutes is one of the oddest in the worldCoordinated Universal Time replaced Greenwich Mean TimeThe new standard relies on atomic clocks rather than the rotation of the EarthThe 24-hour day comes from Earth's rotationThe division into 24 hours is ancient, but the length of the day is not perfectly constantTime zones follow politics more than the SunSeveral countries use offsets that sit far from their solar time, and some use half-hour stepsThe International Date Line is not a straight lineIt zigzags around countries so that no single state has to keep two calendar datesThe Yangtze is the longest river flowing entirely within one nationStretching for 6,300 kilometres across China, the Yangtze River is the longest river in Asia.
🗺️ World Geographyfact 182 of 200
← → to keep reading, or swipe
Tags: time-zones, china, clocks
China keeps one clock across five time zones: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Official time in Beijing applies from the eastern coast to Xinjiang, nearly 5,000 kilometres west. The figure is taken from CIA World Factbook, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a world geography fact?
- Yes. It sits on the World Geography shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.