Legal Vs Sun Time, Sleeping Hours Etc.

[edelweis]

ok... not sure where to post this... please move if necessary.

I live in France. Our legal time is currently 2 hours ahead of the Sun time, which means legal "noon" is not in the middle of the actual daytime. When the clock says noon, the sun says 10am.

So at 8pm it is actually only 6pm sun-wise and the sun is still out.

Yesterday evening I complained on Lang-8 that I was exhausted but the bright rays of sun were giving me too much energy to think about sleeping. (well that's what I meant)

但是我觉得今天晚上也睡不下，因为太阳终于来了。它的亮光让我不想睡觉。(please ignore the mistakes).

Basically the comments I received (from Chinese people) commented that 晚上 how come the sun is still out?

So this made me think about several things...

1) how is the Beijing time relative to sun time? I noticed when I was in Beijing that it seemed more in sync with the sun than French time, but since there is a single legal time for the whole of China, do they use the Beijing sun time as legal time? Or is the legal time actually ahead of the sun time since Beijing is at the east of China?

2) regarding the "early rising Chinese" for whom 5-6am is a normal waking hour and 10pm a rather late hour (please correct if I'm wrong!). Depending on answer to question 1) I'm starting to think that the Chinese are no more early risers than the French... we have roughly the same schedule sun-wise (but then I'm still pretty knackered so I'm not sure I've computed that correctly ;) ). Normal hours for French people would be wake at 7 and go to sleep by 11 (but of course this varies widely among individuals).

3) what is the definition of 晚上? For me "evening/soirée" is anything between 6pm and midnight (although "evening/soir" hints at 8pm-midnight and perhaps even sunset-midnight hmmm...).

[EDIT]

4) are the sleeping hours of city dwellers identical in the west and east of China? or do they adapt their hours based on the sun rather than the legal time?

[Hofmann]

Beijing is behind sun time. Not as far behind as Paris.

晚 is after sunset. 晚上...I don't know, but I'd guess it's the same thing.

[889]

No, Beijing is sometimes ahead of solar time, sometimes lags it, and sometimes matches it.

Check here, and you'll see, for example, that solar noon is 12:00 Beijing time on 20 Nov 2010:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=33&month=11&year=2010&obj=sun&afl=-11&day=1

[edelweis]

＠889: ow, my head hurts. I naively thought the solar noon-to-noon time was constant. But the chart in your link shows it actually varies :blink:

On average Beijing time appears to be roughly the same as sun time though.

@Hofmann: if 晚上 starts at sunset then the lang8 people's reaction make sense. Thanks.

[skylee]

Something else to think about. The time in Xinjiang is the same as Beijing time, but IIRC it is like 3-4 hours behind if it were to be put in the right time zone. So at what time do the people there rise and work and rest?

I felt exhausted when I spent a summer month in Scandinavia because the sun did not really set and it was very disturbing. Do other people normally feel like this about very long days?

[889]

Officially, everything's on Beijing time, but many people seem to live their lives on Xinjiang time, so when you set up an appointment or such you have to make clear whether it's Xinjiang or Beijing time. There's a two-hour difference.

As this article points out, time zones fall somewhat along ethnic lines:

http://www.wyzxsx.com/Article/Class12/200612/13028.html

[YuehanHao]

I don't remember the details, but I have in-laws in Xinjiang, and I know their day starts and ends at nominal times that seem later than the ones I have traditionally been used to. Seems my wife usually calls them at ten o'clock to avoid the chance of waking them up. As a child, I remember hearing a nursery rhyme something like this one below - my wife emphasized to me it does not apply in Xinjiang:

Elsie Marley is grown so fine

She won't get up to feed the swine

But lies in bed till eight or nine

Lazy Elsie Marley

约翰好

[Hofmann]

Oookay. I forgot the earth moved around the sun for a sec.

[Guest realmayo]

And Paris is further north than Beijing so the long summer days and long winter nights are *I think* less of a factor in, say, most of China than in Northern Europe.

[gato]

There's also no Daylight Savings Time in China. So in June, the sun rises at 4:45am in Beijing.

[skylee]

Edit - sorry, complete misunderstanding. I misread gato's post above (somehow didn't see the 'no' before daylight savings etc).

[edelweis]

thanks for the details about Xinjiang.