In 1902 the coastal time of the East China Sea was set to the meridian 120° E (National Time Service Center; archived copy). On 9 March 1939 the Ministry of the Interior held a standard-time meeting that divided the country into five zones: Kunlun (western Xinjiang and part of Tibet), Xinzang (Xinjiang and Tibet), Longshu (central China), Central Plains (the coast), and Changbai (the northeast). The center places Peiping, later Beijing, in the Central Plains zone.
On 28 September 1949, Beijing Xinhua Radio Station made the first broadcast that used the name Beijing Time. On 2 November 1949 the Xi'an government said that from 3 November it would stop using Longshu time and switch to Beijing time, so the city would match the main areas of the country. The center dates Chengdu's announcement of Beijing time to within ten days of 27 December 1949. It says that by early 1950 Beijing time was in use in almost every part of the country except Xinjiang and Tibet.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences says that in 1966 the National Time Service Center was established as the only scientific research institution in China specialized in time and frequency, and that since its founding the center has generated, maintained, and disseminated China's national standard time, Beijing Time.
The times below are for 2026, computed at this site's coordinates for Beijing and Ürümqi and then read on the Beijing Time clock (Asia/Shanghai, UTC+8). Solar noon in Ürümqi arrives 2 hours 2 minutes to 2 hours 17 minutes after 12:00 Beijing Time on these four dates in 2026. The last column, Noon gap, is how much later solar noon falls in Ürümqi than in Beijing, so it compares the two cities with each other and not with 12:00. Ürümqi lies 28.8° of longitude west of Beijing, which is 1 h 55 min at 4 minutes per degree, and the gap is the same on every date because the equation of time moves both noons by the same amount. The span above is longer because Beijing Time follows 120° E, and Ürümqi is farther west of that meridian than Beijing is.
| Date | Beijing | Ürümqi | Noon gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sat 21 Mar | Rise 06:17 Noon 12:22 Set 18:27 | Rise 08:12 Noon 14:17 Set 20:23 | 1 h 55 min |
| Sun 21 Jun | Rise 04:46 Noon 12:16 Set 19:46 | Rise 06:27 Noon 14:11 Set 21:55 | 1 h 55 min |
| Wed 23 Sep | Rise 06:02 Noon 12:07 Set 18:11 | Rise 07:58 Noon 14:02 Set 20:06 | 1 h 55 min |
| Mon 21 Dec | Rise 07:32 Noon 12:12 Set 16:52 | Rise 09:40 Noon 14:08 Set 18:35 | 1 h 55 min |
Method: Computed with this site's sun code at the dataset coordinates for Beijing (39.904° N, 116.407° E) and Ürümqi (43.801° N, 87.6005° E). Every time is shown in Beijing Time (Asia/Shanghai, UTC+8). Sunrise, solar noon and sunset are rounded half up to the nearest minute. The noon gap is the difference of the unrounded solar noons, then rounded to the nearest minute.
Time in China is the civil clock for the country. Time in Ürümqi and sunrise in Ürümqi use the same coordinates as the table.
The IANA time zone database calls Asia/Shanghai “Beijing time, used throughout China.” Its standard offset is 8:00. Asia/Urumqi is “Xinjiang time, used by many in western China,” represented by Ürümqi. The file says to use Asia/Shanghai if you want Beijing time. Asia/Urumqi is local mean time until 1928 and a fixed offset of 6:00 after that, with no daylight-saving rule. The notes describe Xinjiang Time as two hours behind Beijing time, or UTC+6, and say it is officially recognized. They also say there are no good records of time in Xinjiang before 1986, so the step from local mean time to UTC+6 at the start of 1928 is an approximation of that missing record. A 2014 note in the file says computers and phones list Ürümqi, or Kashgar, at the same time as Beijing. The file also says an early Tibet zone at UTC+6 was withdrawn in 1959, before the database's 1970 cutoff, so Tibet is not a separate entry (IANA tz database).