Did You Know?
Singapore Has Used Six Different Time Zones in One Century
Most cities on this list have changed their clock once or twice. Singapore has done it six times.
- Before June 1905: GMT+6:55:25 — Singapore mean time, calculated from the sun
- June 1905 – December 1932: GMT+7:00
- January 1933 – August 1941: GMT+7:20
- September 1941 – February 1942: GMT+7:30
- February 1942 – September 1945: GMT+9:00
- September 1945 – December 1981: GMT+7:30
- January 1982 – today: GMT+8:00
That fifth line is the Japanese Occupation. For three and a half years Singapore was moved onto Tokyo time, an hour and a half ahead of where it had been — because a time zone is a straightforward way of drawing an empire's borders through the day as well as across the map.
There is a small, human record of what that meant. In 1985, forty years after the Occupation ended, a reader wrote to a Singapore newspaper asking for help: they had been born during those years, their birth certificate recorded a time of 5:30 pm, and they wanted to know what time they had actually been born.
The clock: the last change is the one Singapore lives with now, and it was somebody else's decision.
On 31 December 1981, Malaysia unified its own two time zones by moving Peninsular Malaysia forward half an hour. Singapore followed suit at the same moment, citing business and travel schedules, and has been on UTC+8 ever since.
UTC+8 is built for the 120th meridian. Singapore sits at 104° east. The city therefore runs about sixty-five minutes ahead of its own sun — about the same gap as Istanbul's, and one of the larger ones on this list.
You can see it if you know to look. Singapore is almost exactly on the equator, where sunrise should be near six and sunset near six, all year, forever. Instead the sun comes up around seven and goes down around seven.
An equatorial city with the most predictable sky on Earth, running permanently an hour late, because of a decision taken in Kuala Lumpur that took effect on New Year's Eve 1981.
Sources
- BiblioAsia (National Library of Singapore), *Daylight Robbery: Singapore's Shifting Time Zones* (full list of the seven zones and their dates; reader wrote to the paper in 1985)
- Wikipedia, *Singapore Time* (1 January 1982 change; business and travel reason)
- Longitude calculation: Singapore 103.8°E, UTC+8 meridian 120°E → ~65 minutes