Daegu, South Korea · UTC+9 ☆

Daegu, South Korea’s fourth-largest city, shares Asia/Seoul with the rest of the country: Korea Standard Time, UTC+9, no daylight saving. South Korea abolished DST in 1988, after the Seoul Olympics. The rationale was simplicity and the modest gains from DST at Korean latitudes (35-38 degrees north) were not worth the disruption.

Daegu sits in a basin surrounded by mountains, which gives it a continental temperature pattern more extreme than Seoul or the coasts. It is famously the hottest major city in Korea during summer, regularly exceeding 35°C during July and August. The basin traps heat and blocks sea breezes. Residents adapt: the city has extensive underground shopping malls and covered arcades that allow movement during peak heat without full sun exposure.

A colonial clock that stayed

Korea’s single-timezone approach mirrors Japan’s just to the east. Seoul and Daegu are both UTC+9 despite Korea sitting a full degree of longitude west of Japan. The offset was effectively chosen to match Japanese time during the colonial period and has stayed. Solar noon in Daegu arrives around 12:30pm, a modest deviation from clock noon. The precision-minded would note the mismatch; most people do not.

Convert 9am Daegu time to London

Sources

• IANA Time Zone Database
• Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA)
• Cumings, Bruce. Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. W.W. Norton, 1997.

Read more about time in South Korea →