Beijing Watch Factory is one of the founding houses of modern Chinese watchmaking and, alongside Sea-Gull and Shanghai, one of the country’s historic “big three” manufacturers. It was officially established on 19 June 1958 in Beijing at the initiative of Peng Zhen, the city’s mayor and Communist Party secretary, who insisted that its watches be able to stand comparison with Swiss quality. While the factory was being built, a first team of 21 trainees learned the craft at the Beijing Industrial College, and technicians from Tsinghua and Tianjin universities joined experienced watchmakers recruited from southern China.
The first 17 watches were completed in September 1958. Called the BS-1, they used a 17-jewel copy of the Swiss Roamer MST 371 calibre, and only 3,726 were made before the BS-2 took over in 1961, built on surplus Swiss tooling and produced in some 160,000 examples. For decades the factory operated within China’s planned economy, initially supplying senior officials before serving a fast-growing domestic market. In the 1970s it produced its own version of the Chinese Standard movement (ZB-1), exported under the Shuangling (“Double Rhomb”) name, and developed the SZB-1C, the first automatic version of the Standard movement to reach production. Even when its quartz output passed 100,000 movements a month, Beijing never stopped making mechanical watches.
The return of the mechanical watch as an object of prestige in the mid-1990s opened a new chapter. Under master watchmaker Xu Yaonan, the factory began developing a tourbillon in 1995 and had a running prototype in 1996, making it the first Chinese company to build a tourbillon movement. After the Asian financial crisis delayed production, Xu returned from retirement in 2001, and the red-gold “Hong Jin”, powered by the TB01 calibre, became China’s first tourbillon watch in the early 2000s. It was followed by the TB02 double tourbillon, created for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the eight-day TB03, the MRB1 minute-repeater tourbillon and the multi-axis TB04. Beijing presented these complications to the international trade at Baselworld in 2006 and 2008.
Privatised in 2004 with its workforce and production largely intact, the company joined Fiyta in October 2016. Beijing Watch Factory remains a true manufacture: movements, hands, dials and bracelets are made in-house, as are enamel painting, lacquering and engraving. Its movement capacity also supplies other Chinese and foreign brands, while its tourbillons are reserved exclusively for its own high-end watches.
Today the Beijing catalogue is built around in-house calibres such as the hand-wound SB18 with its three-quarter plate, the SB20 automatic and the B24 with twin balance wheels, alongside the brand’s tourbillon and minute-repeater movements. Many pieces celebrate Chinese culture through enamel dials, gold-wire outlines and motifs such as dragons and phoenixes; one “Playing Dragon and Phoenix” model sold for one million yuan. For enthusiasts, Beijing offers a rare combination: genuine vertical integration, a heritage that mirrors the history of Chinese watchmaking itself, and high-end complications that remain accessible compared with their Swiss counterparts.
