During the Raj, the colony operated three main times: Bombay Time, at GMT+4:51 Madras Time, at GMT+5:21 and Calcutta Time, at GMT+5:54. Indeed, India’s standardised time, though half an hour short of being the norm, isn’t as unusual a time zone as it used to be before it became independent. The reasons for all of these aren’t entirely clear, but the heavy involvement of the British Empire in the region might have something to do with it. Iran’s time zone runs on GMT+3½, Afghanistan’s on GMT+4 ½, India is on GMT+5 ½, and Burma uses GMT+6 ½. This brings us to the main cluster of countries where somebody decided it was vaguely acceptable to sit half an hour out of kilter with the rest of the world. Though, in fairness, the 6,080 people of St Pierre and Miquelon, a hang-on dribble of islands from the days of the French Empire, stubbornly sticks to GMT-3 even though the nearest major place that uses it is Brazil. About a hundred years later in 1963, when it had been subsumed into the independent nation of Canada, the provincial government tried to click it back into sync with the rest of the Atlantic region of Canada. That’s basically because Newfoundland was a separate colony when time zones became a thing, so it had the right to establish its own time zone. The bulk of the country makes things simple enough, running from GMT-4 in the east, through GMT-5 in Toronto and Québec, GMT-6 in Winnipeg, GMT-7 in Edmonton to GMT-8 in Vancouver in the west.
Staying in a similar geographic locale, the Newfoundlanders decided to screw up the orderliness of Canada’s time zones. Meanwhile, Greenland’s 18th-largest city of Ittoqqortoormiit runs on GMT-1 along with pretty much nobody except the Azores and Cape Verde. The Thule Air Base, run by the United States Air Force in the northwest of Greenland, runs on GMT-4, while the Danmarkshavn weather station (permanent population: eight) runs on GMT – for no particularly good reason. Almost all of Greenland runs on GMT-3, putting it four hours behind its parent nation, Denmark but a few tiny corners insist on having things their own way.
If anything, in fact, goes rather too far the other way. Greenland is another fairly big place, but it has not made the same mistakes as China. Pleasingly, though, the country’s uniform time zone means that if you can negotiate the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas, you can cross over into Afghanistan and set your clock back three and a half hours – the biggest land border time-zone change on the planet.
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