Jesper Norgaard Welen <jnorgard@prodigy.net.mx> writes:
* Asia/Harbin seems to cover the Heilongjiang region, no less no more.
It also includes Jilin.
* Asia/Chongqing is a city lying in the Sichuan province, which is huge, so does the timezone represent all of the province?
Yes. It also includes east Gansu, Guangxi Zhuang, Guizhu, Ningxia Hui, Sichuan, Yunnan, and perhaps some other areas (I haven't checked Qinghai yet, for example). Shanks & Pottenger write that the time zone boundaries did not follow provincial boundaries: Gansu was split, for example. This may help to explain Asia/Urumqi versus Asia/Kashgar versus whatever: I suspect Xinjiang and Tibet were split though I haven't had the time to find the boundaries. Also Inner Mongolia.
* Asia/Shanghai covers all the rest of China as I understand it.
Yes. I'll try to pry loose some time and find out more precisely what the boundaries were, according to Shanks & Pottenger's data. It's not a trivial task, I'm afraid. Which provincial boundaries have moved since 1980? This knowledge would help me in my task. For example, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:China_administrative.png> says that the Qinghai-Gansu border has moved but gives no details. "Zhe Su" <james.su@gmail.com> writes:
Actually those are legacy timezones which are not used anymore.
Yes, if you don't care about pre-1980 time stamps, then you can use TZ='Asia/Shanghai', or even TZ='CST-8' on POSIX hosts. However, if you do care about old time stamps, then Asia/Harbin etc. are not "legacy", because they have a practical difference for programs running on today's computers.