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Yangon Had a Time Ball Before It Had a Time Zone

The Shwedagon Pagoda counts everything.

The crown at the top of the stupa carries, by the usual reckoning, 5,448 diamonds, 2,317 rubies, sapphires and other stones, and around 1,065 golden bells, finished with a single diamond of 72 or 76 carats at the very tip. The lower stupa is said to be plated with 8,688 solid gold bars and the upper with another 13,153. Over twenty thousand bars, individually enumerated.

There is exactly one number nobody has.

Nobody knows how much gold is on the Shwedagon. Published estimates range from about six tonnes to sixty. Lonely Planet says twenty-seven. The reason for the spread is that the gold is not a finish applied once and measured. It is donated — arriving continuously, in leaf, from individuals, and it has been doing so since the fifteenth century, when Queen Shinsawbu gave her own body weight in gold to be beaten into sheets. Her son-in-law then offered four times his own weight and his wife's.

People are still donating. There is now a small gold mill inside the pagoda compound to process it, because the leaf weathers and the surface needs redoing every four or five years.

A monument where every diamond has been counted and the gold cannot be, in a city that once dropped a ball at noon so ships could set their clocks to the second.

Before there was Myanmar Standard Time, there was Rangoon Mean Time — GMT+6:24:40, the mean solar time at the meridian of Rangoon itself. The first confirmed record of it being in use dates to 1892.

A year later, on 1 October 1893, the city opened a time ball observatory.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It is the same device that drops daily at Greenwich, the same device Western Union installed in Manhattan in 1877, and the same technology Hong Kong replaced with a cannon. A ball was hoisted and dropped at local mean noon so that ships in the harbour could set their chronometers and calculate longitude at sea.

Rangoon was a port. Ports needed public time. The solution was the same everywhere, from London to Manhattan to the Irrawaddy.

1 July 1905: Burma moved to Burma Standard Time at UTC+6:30, calculated on the 97°30′ east meridian — about five minutes and twenty seconds ahead of the old Rangoon Mean Time. The reason was the same one that produced standard time everywhere else: railways and telegraphs needed a single clock.

Then, from 1 May 1942 to 2 May 1945, the country was placed on Japan Standard Time under occupation — the same thing that happened to Singapore in the same years.

After independence in 1948 the offset stayed. Myanmar has never observed daylight saving time, in any form, ever.

The clock: and it turns out that 1905 decision was very well made.

UTC+6:30 is built for 97°30′ east. Yangon sits at about 96°10′ east. The city's clock runs roughly five minutes ahead of its own sun — one of the tightest alignments anywhere in this series.

Myanmar spans a considerable east-west distance and could have rounded to UTC+6 or UTC+7. Either would have left Yangon more than half an hour out. The colonial administration picked the half hour in between, and the country has kept it through occupation, independence and everything since.

The ball stopped dropping a long time ago. The number it was calibrating is still there.

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