Which country has the most time zones?

France, with twelve, which is only true because of the pieces of it scattered around the planet - French Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Reunion, New Caledonia, French Guiana and the rest. Mainland France uses one. Russia, which everyone guesses, has eleven and holds the record for a single contiguous landmass.

China is the interesting opposite case. It spans about five natural time zones and uses one, Beijing time, for all of it. In the far west that puts the sun at its highest around three in the afternoon, and Xinjiang runs an informal parallel clock two hours behind that appears on no official document.

The whole system is barely 140 years old. Before railways, every town kept its own noon by the sun, and it was the impossibility of writing a timetable across dozens of local times that forced standardisation. The 1884 conference in Washington that put the prime meridian at Greenwich did so largely because most of the world's shipping was already using British charts.