Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 00:25:08 -0400 (EDT) From: <yaoz@vidar.niaaa.nih.gov>
1. City names are in old form. Now there is a standard way (pinyin) to write it and it should be used;
The tz database uses the most common spelling in ordinary English. For example, it uses "Rome", even though "Roma" is the correct Italian name. When I first added those entries, the pinyin method was not the most common spelling in English, and my impression is that "Chungking" and "Kashgar" are still quite commonly used in English, so it's not entirely clear to me that the time is right to switch to pinyin. (If I'm incorrect about this, please let me know.) However, I think it's quite reasonable to support both spellings, and so I'll add aliases for the pinyin spellings in my next proposed patch.
2. Comments are not quite right. This may due to the historic reasons. Because of these problems, when users in China are presented a form to pick a time zone, they are very confused.
How about if we make the following change for now? CN +3114+12128 Asia/Shanghai most locations CN +4545+12641 Asia/Harbin Heilongjiang CN +2934+10635 Asia/Chungking China mountains CN +4348+08735 Asia/Urumqi Tibet & most of Xinjiang CN +3929+07559 Asia/Kashgar Eastern Turkestan The "most locations" phrase should reduce some of the confusion; it's used for other countries that have a similar situation (e.g. Chile, New Zealand). I'm not sure about using the label "Beijing Time" for all of these locations. (Don't people say "China time" more often than "Beijing Time"?) Ideally the five entries would clearly delineate the boundaries between the five regions of China that have different time zone histories, but I don't have that information to hand right now.