Time in China

Clocks square off in China's far west - LA Times.

In Western China the local people set their clocks two hours different than the official Chinese time, which is the same for all of China. Theoretically China should have 5 time zones, but everything is set the same.

I did not know this:

"The reason goes back to a long Chinese imperial tradition in which the emperor is in control of time because it has a cosmological significance," said James Millward, a Xin- jiang scholar at Georgetown University.