Girard-Perregaux: The Watch Made for China's Last Emperor

The most acclaimed Swiss pocket watch of the nineteenth century does not end up with a European king. It does not end up with an American railroad baron. It ends up on the chest of a Mexican general who rules his country for thirty-five years and dies in exile in Paris. Eighty-one years after he buys it, the Swiss workshop that made it has to buy it back from his descendants to claim its own history. The workshop is Girard-Perregaux. The watch is called La Esmeralda. To understand how it gets there, you have to understand what watchmaking looks like before one man decides to break it open. For three hundred years before eighteen sixty-seven, the watchmaker's job is to hide. The dial faces the world. The mechanism faces the watchmaker. Bridges are the small metal plates that hold the gears in place, unsigned and unseen, buried under enamel and lacquer. The wearer sees the time. The wearer never sees the work. The watchmakers know the bridges are beautiful. They polish them. They bevel the edges. They engrave the inner surfaces with patterns no customer will ever look at. Then they close the case.