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Nepal Is Fifteen Minutes Ahead of India, and Fifty-Seven Years Ahead of Everyone

UNESCO's World Heritage listing for the Kathmandu Valley is a single entry. Inside it are seven separate monument groups: the Durbar Squares of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur; the Buddhist stupas of Swayambhu and Bauddhanath; and the Hindu temples of Pashupati and Changu Narayan.

All seven sit within a radius of roughly twenty kilometres. You can visit every one of them in a day or two without leaving the valley, which also contains at least 130 other monuments considered significant, three of Nepal's largest cities, and about 2.5 million people.

The country around it is doing something similar with mountains. Nepal contains eight of the world's fourteen peaks over 8,000 metres — Everest, Kanchenjunga, Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu and Annapurna I. A country roughly the size of England and Wales combined holds more than half of the highest places on Earth.

Nepal packs an improbable amount into a small space, and then does the same thing with its clock — which is where the fifteen minutes come in.

Almost every country in the world rounds its clock to the nearest hour. A handful round to the nearest half hour. Nepal is the only country on Earth whose national time zone is set to a quarter past — UTC+5:45.

The history explains how, and the geography explains why.

Nepal ran on local solar time until 1920, when Kathmandu's own mean time was UTC+5:41:16. In 1920 the country adopted Indian Standard Time, UTC+5:30, to align with British India for administration and trade.

Then on 1 January 1986, Nepal advanced its clocks by fifteen minutes and has kept them there ever since.

The new reference meridian was 86°15′ east, which runs through the peak of Gaurishankar — a sacred mountain about a hundred kilometres east of Kathmandu. The arithmetic is exact: 86.25 divided by 15 gives 5.75 hours, which is five hours and forty-five minutes precisely.

Everest was not chosen. Gaurishankar sits closer to the country's centre, and the meridian India was using would have divided Nepal too unevenly.

The result is a country that is fifteen minutes ahead of the neighbour that surrounds it on three sides, and 2 hours 15 minutes behind the one along its northern border. Crossing from Nepal into China moves the clock by two and a quarter hours in a single step.

Nepal is one of only three places in the world using a 45-minute offset. The others are New Zealand's Chatham Islands at UTC+12:45, and a small unofficial zone around Eucla in Australia. Nepal is the only country.

The clock: and the fifteen minutes are not the largest gap between Nepal and the rest of the world.

Nepal's official calendar is Bikram Sambat, which runs roughly fifty-seven years ahead of the Gregorian calendar.

So a Nepali business dealing with an Indian partner is fifteen minutes ahead in the day, and about fifty-seven years ahead in the year. Neither of those numbers is an accident, and neither of them is going to change. Nepal was never colonised, and its clock and its calendar both say so.

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