Phake Nick wrote:
> According to Singaporean newspaper
> http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/singfreepresswk19041102-1.2.37
> , the day that Hong Kong start using GMT+8 should be Oct 30, 1904.

Thanks for doing all that research on Hong Kong.

I also see that sometime between 2009 and 2014 the Hong Kong Observatory changed
the 1952 DST fallback date from "25 Oct" (which agrees with Shanks) to "2 Nov";
we might as well stay in sync with the HKO unless we can find newspapers to the
contrary.

Also, a British astronomer H.P.H. (I don't know who that is) reported in the
February 1905 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the
1904-10-30 time ball drop in Hong Kong occurred at 17:00 GMT (presumably this
was GMT the previous day).

I attempted to distill the above into tzdata and installed the attached proposed
patch to the development version. Please let me know if you see any problems
with it. And thanks again for these fixes.