When the Chinese watch boom was at its height, manufacturers put any number of traditional motifs on to watch dials to make timepieces attractive to that market. To illustrate the incentive, Swiss watch exports to China went from SFr45m ($47m) in 2000 to SFr1.4bn in 2014.
However, some makers eschewed the manufacture of watches busy with Chinese symbols for something a little more profound. “I was never really in favour of doing special models for a country or something like that,” says Marc Hayek, chief executive of Blancpain. “But at the same time you take the influence from different cultures, and the fascination was learning more about Chinese culture,” he says of the thinking behind Blancpain’s Chinese calendar watch, launched in 2012, which has densely printed Chinese characters around its three subdials.
The idea of making a Chinese calendar watch first arose about a decade ago when he discussed the idea with some friends in Taiwan. Beyond naming its years after animals, the Chinese calendar is lunisolar. That is to say, it is based on the cycle of the moon, or 29.5 days. A year of 12 lunar months works out, therefore, approximately 11 days short of the solar year of 365.24 days.