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A Time Zone That Lasted Exactly 993 Days

The Pyongyang Metro opened on 6 September 1973. Its platforms sit more than 110 metres below ground — among the deepest anywhere — and the descent by escalator takes roughly three and a half to four minutes. The stations were built to double as shelters, with heavy steel blast doors, and the depth holds the temperature at about 20°C all year regardless of the season outside.

The network is two lines, 16 stations, 22.5 kilometres. Daily ridership is estimated at somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000 — the range is wide because reliable figures are hard to obtain. The station names translate as Reunification, Rejuvenation, Glory, Triumph, Red Star, Liberation, Construction.

Above ground, the city holds a different kind of record. On 14 August 2007, Guinness World Records recognised the Arirang Mass Games as the largest gymnastic display ever staged, with 100,090 participants at the Rungrado 1st of May Stadium. The count was adjudicated on site. The card-stunt mosaics on the stadium's north side are formed by more than 30,000 schoolchildren, each holding coloured cards. Participants are largely students who rehearse for months, which has drawn concern from outside observers.

The clock: a hundred thousand people moving in unison is one form of synchronisation. Moving a country's clocks by decree is another, and Pyongyang has done that twice in a decade.

On 5 August 2015, the government announced that from 15 August the country would move from UTC+9 to UTC+8:30, under the name Pyongyang Time. The date was the 70th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule, and state media presented the change as removing a standard imposed during the 1910–1945 occupation. Before 1912, the peninsula had used a local time close to UTC+8:28.

It put North Korea half an hour behind South Korea, which had itself used UTC+8:30 between 1954 and 1961.

It lasted exactly 993 days.

On 27 April 2018, at the inter-Korean summit at Panmunjom, Kim Jong Un met South Korean President Moon Jae-in. According to the state news agency KCNA, he remarked on the two clocks on the wall of the summit venue — one labelled Pyongyang, one Seoul — describing the sight as "a painful wrench."

Two days later the reversal was announced. On 5 May 2018 the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly adopted a decree titled On Resetting Pyongyang Time, and the clocks moved forward thirty minutes to rejoin UTC+9.

Very few countries have created a time zone and abolished it again in the same decade.

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