City comparison · time difference and converter
Shanghai is 13 hours ahead of Lima right now. Lima sits in Peru on Lima; Shanghai sits in China on Shanghai. They are roughly 17,159 km apart (10,662 mi), a flight of about 21h 11m. Lima's metro holds around 11.2 million people; Shanghai's around 26.3 million.
Slot 1
00:00 / 13:00
Lima / Shanghai
Partial overlapSlot 2
01:00 / 14:00
Lima / Shanghai
Partial overlapSlot 3
02:00 / 15:00
Lima / Shanghai
Partial overlapEach row is one hour in Lima. Green rows are inside business hours in both cities; amber means only one side is at their desk; grey rows fall outside business hours in both.
Dragon Boat Festival
Shanghai, China · 端午节
Fri, Jun 19
Saint Peter and Saint Paul
Lima, Peru · Día de San Pedro y San Pablo
Mon, Jun 29
Great-circle distance
17,159 km
(10,662 mi)
Approximate flight
21h 11m
850 km/h cruise + 1h taxi/climb/descent
Jet lag
13h
Roughly 1 day to adjust per timezone crossed
The heatmap gives you the shape of the day. If you need to convert one specific hour — say a customer call or a release window — open the converter with both cities already loaded.
Open in converter →The difference between Lima and Shanghai is not really a number, it's a daily rhythm. Shanghai is 13 hours ahead of Lima on the clock today, but the lived version is that Shanghai is wrapping up the working day while Lima is still in the morning, and the overlap people actually use is narrow. That gap, more than the raw offset, is what teams have to design around.
In Lima, the working day picks up earliest in the financial districts — Lima's downtown core wakes early and breaks for lunch at the usual hour. The mood in Shanghai is its own story: Shanghai settles into the evening at the usual hour, with the local commuter pattern setting the pace. If you are scheduling between the two, the heatmap above marks the rows where both patterns line up.
Daylight saving is the other thing to keep an eye on. Peru either observes DST or holds a fixed offset year-round; China either follows its region's DST pattern or stays put all year. When the two changes are weeks apart, the offset between Lima and Shanghai is one hour off the usual for that stretch — a cliff that catches recurring calendar invites unless your calendar app rebases them automatically. Pin the meeting to a city, not an offset, and the tool handles the rest.
For travellers, the 21h 11m flight is the short version of the story. The longer one is jet lag: roughly one day of adjustment per timezone crossed, which means a trip across the 13-hour gap costs about 13 groggy days on each side. Pilots and cabin crew swear by morning sunlight and an early walk; whatever your routine, the wall-clock numbers above are the source of truth for your first morning in the new city.