Asia/Taipei

TZ identifier and aliases

Asia/Taipei is the canonical identifier for Taiwan's civil time, covering the entire island. It has no aliases at all in the tz database's grouping — no deprecated backward-compatibility name and no other zone currently sharing identical rules — so Asia/Taipei has been the sole identifier for Taiwanese civil time throughout the tz database's history.

UTC offset and DST rule

Asia/Taipei is +08:00 year-round with no daylight saving time. Taiwan used DST for several extended periods through the mid-20th century but abolished it for good in 1979, and has kept a single fixed offset ever since.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Asia/Taipei for a process that should schedule by Taiwanese local time. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Asia/Taipei'; or the timezone setting. Because the offset never changes, a cron job's local-time schedule behaves identically every day of the year, with no DST boundary or skipped/duplicated local hour to plan around — a real operational advantage for a zone that hosts a significant share of global semiconductor manufacturing and supply-chain scheduling, where predictable timing matters across many connected systems.

History and quirks

Taiwan's time zone history runs through several different governments in quick succession. Under Japanese colonial administration, the island used Japan's own zone and briefly observed a wartime "Double Summer Time" scheme pushing clocks forward more aggressively than ordinary DST to maximize usable daylight for war production. After 1945, the incoming Republic of China government kept daylight saving in place through most of the postwar decades — with a few short interruptions — before finally abolishing it in 1979, settling on the fixed +08:00 offset the island has used ever since. That's the same numeric offset as mainland China's single national zone, Asia/Shanghai, but the two are entirely independent identifiers in the tz database, reflecting Taiwan's distinct, self-governing civil administration rather than any coordination with Beijing. Periodic proposals to revisit DST — usually framed around energy conservation — have surfaced since the 1990s but never gained enough traction to pass.

Under Japanese rule the island had used +08:00 for part of its history too, before briefly shifting to align with Tokyo's own +09:00 during a wartime administrative reorganization — meaning Taiwan's 20th century included stretches at both of the offsets it now sits between geographically. That back-and-forth, combined with the DST interruptions of the postwar decades, makes historical timestamp data from mid-20th-century Taiwan some of the trickier records in this family to resolve accurately without consulting the specific year's rule, a caution worth keeping in mind for any archival or genealogical software handling Taiwanese records from that period.

Offsets and DST transitions on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database bundled with your browser; the rules described above were verified against tzdata 2026b when this page was published.