On 10/12/2010 06:24 PM, Jonathan Hassid wrote:
So I was wondering what the sources are for China having multiple time zones from 1949-1980, and who is correct here
Thanks for bringing that source to our attention. Our source for the current set of historical data is: Thomas G. Shanks and Rique Pottenger, The International Atlas (6th edition), San Diego: ACS Publications, Inc. (2003). ISBN 0-935127-88-7. There is also one other reliable source, though alas it contains just one transition: China: if it's light, it must be Urumqi TIME, 1986-02-17, p. 52 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,960684,00.html> (Naturally the two sources disagree. :-)
From the TIME source, it's quite clear that the question of what time it is in Urumqi has been controversial for years, and I expect that it'll be as hard to get reliable data for Urumqi as it is for Mongolia.
All that being said, I think the source you provided is more reliable than Shanks & Pottenger for older time stamps. I found it abstracted at <http://www.cqvip.com/qk/91361x/2003001/7468687.html> but unfortunately cannot read it. Can you summarize what it says, precisely enough for us to generate tables from it? For example, the abstract says there was a transition most likely on 1949-09-27 (though it could have been as late as 1949-10-06), but it doesn't say what the transition was from, or to, or where the transition occurred (presumably Beijing?). Your email says the rest of the country switched by the beginning of 1950, with the exception of Tibet following in 1960 and Xinjiang by 1975; are there more details about what the transitions were from and when they occurred?