Some countries are wide enough that the sun rises hours apart at their two ends. Each of them has had to decide whether the clock should follow the sky or the state. They did not all decide the same way.
Beijing — China is about 5,000 kilometres wide, spanning five geographical time zones from roughly 73° to 135° east. From 1918 the Republic of China ran exactly five: Kunlun at UTC+5:30, Sinkiang–Tibet at UTC+6, Kansu–Shensi at UTC+7, Chungyuan at UTC+8 and Kungshan at UTC+8:30. In 1949 all five were abolished and the country was put on one clock: Beijing Time, UTC+8. The effect is most visible in the far west, where in Kashgar the midwinter sun does not come up until around ten in the morning by the official clock. In practice a second, unofficial time — Xinjiang or Ürümqi Time, two hours behind Beijing — is widely used in daily life there, and the international time zone database carries an entry for it.
Delhi — India made the same choice for the same stated reason: national cohesion. Indian Standard Time was fixed on 1 September 1947 at UTC+5:30, calculated from a single meridian at 82°30′ east. Geographically India would have three zones; it is wider than the contiguous United States, which has four. The sun rises about ninety minutes earlier at India's eastern edge than at its western one, and in Assam sunset can arrive around half past four in the afternoon while the working day continues. Assam's tea gardens have quietly run an hour ahead of the country on unofficial Tea Garden Time since the British era, and still do.
Moscow — Russia went the other way and kept eleven time zones, more than any other country. But it centralised in a different way: for most of the last century Soviet and Russian railway timetables were published in Moscow time across the entire network, so a passenger boarding in the far east read a departure time with no relationship to the sun outside the window.
Melbourne — Australia is the counter-example, and it is instructive. Because daylight saving is a state matter rather than a federal one, Australia's three official time zones become five for six months of the year, including two separate half-hour offsets. Nobody designed this. Every jurisdiction answered the question separately and this is the shape the answers made. It even extends down to single towns: Broken Hill, in New South Wales, keeps South Australian time.
Kuala Lumpur — Malaysia faced a smaller version of the same problem, a half-hour seam running between Peninsular and East Malaysia, and closed it in the last thirty minutes of 1981.
Between them these five make the argument as clearly as it can be made. A clock can be accurate or it can be shared. Over a large enough country, it cannot be both — and every government that has faced that choice has chosen shared.