Sabah and Sarawak: time zone history, and your birth hour
The clocks in Sabah and Sarawak have changed 18 times since 1900. Today they run on UTC+8; the last change was on 11 Sep 1945. A calculator that uses today’s offset for every birth is out by some minutes for anyone born in any of the different eras below.
Since 1925, the widest gap is the wartime, on Tokyo time from 1942: 60 minutes, enough to move about 50% of births into a different two-hour period.
Every era
| From – to | Clock | Versus today · births in another hour |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Jan 1900 – 1 Mar 1926 | UTC+7:21 local mean time | −39 min about 33% |
| 1 Mar 1926 – 1 Jan 1933 | UTC+7:30 standard time | −30 min about 25% |
| 1 Jan 1933 – 14 Sep 1935 | UTC+8 standard time | same |
1935–1942, 7 stretcheseach stretch
| UTC+8:20 in summer, UTC+8 the rest of the year | up to 20 min about 17% |
| 16 Feb 1942 – 11 Sep 1945 | UTC+9 wartime, on Tokyo time | +60 min about 50% |
| 11 Sep 1945 – today | UTC+8 standard time | same |
The second figure in each row is the births moved into another two-hour period: about m/120 of them when the clock is m minutes out. For Kuala Lumpur, 30 minutes out from 1946 to 1981, the measured share is 26.0% of 4,000 sampled births.