Concept of time 1 (China)

After a very long day on the road, with the lone star’s motorcycle suffering puncture after puncture after puncture, we arrived at our Dunhuang hotel at 2am instead of the scheduled 5pm (in time for dinner at 6.30pm).  Once I’d registered our arrival, got ourselves allocated rooms, and helped move the 54 boxes of filming equipment, the crew sent me off for a crate of beer—always my second task once I’d done the hotel registration and seen the filming equipment safely ensconced in the rooms.

Where to get beer at 2.30am?  The outskirts of Dunhang (in Xinjiang, S.W.China) had been in total darkness on our way in, with no street lights at all, so there couldn’t possibly be anywhere open.  Even the hotel restaurant was closed.  

Still, I ventured out into the unlit street, wondering where to start, when a young man just suddenly loomed out of the darkness on the pavement.  Amazingly, when I asked him if there was a shop around where I could buy beer, he led me to one about 100 yards down the road!  Even more amazingly, there were actually a few men slurping piping hot noodles!  At 2.30am!  

As soon as we entered, one of the noodle-eaters asked my young man what the time was.  He asked, “Beijing time or Xinjiang time?”  

It turned out that China has only one time zone.  It does make things easier in one sense, with everyone having the same time reference, but considering its vast size, which must require three or four time zones, it’s a crazy system in a way.  No wonder people were still eating noodles at 2.30am!  Because Xinjiang time is really four hours behind Beijing, so it was still only 10.30pm for them.  

Somehow, the locals just coped with it:  by carrying Xinjiang time in their heads for things like eating and being out and about, it seems.  I wonder how they manage to get enough sleep if they go by Beijing time for official business and Xinjiang time (four hours behind) for their social activities?  I know that the Chinese have 2-hour lunch breaks, so maybe the Xinjiang people just have a longer siesta, so that they can still be slurping noodles at 2.30am?

(China, 1988)