Peacock Watches
Peacock Watches carries one of the deepest and most improbable lineages in Chinese watchmaking, tracing back to 1957 in Dandong (formerly Andong), a city whose relationship with timepieces began even earlier: historical records show watch factories operating there during the Guangxu period of the Qing dynasty, and after Andong opened as a treaty port in 1906, Swiss, German, and Japanese watch and clock imports flowed through the city, linking its fortunes to the wider world of horology decades before any local manufacturing began. By 1912, a city of barely 100,000 people supported some 50 watch shops, several of which — Andong Nanyang Watch Spectacles Co., Eternal Fortune Watch Store, North Sea Watch Store among them — were producing their own watches and clocks and opening branches as far away as Shanghai. That inherited culture of watchmaking set the stage for Peacock's own origin: in the 1950s, seven technicians at the Andong Metal Products Factory began exploring mechanical watch repair in their spare time, armed with little more than a magnifying glass, a modified screwdriver, and tweezers. Emboldened by their growing skill, the seven set themselves an audacious goal — to build a watch of their own — in a China where watchmaking technology and equipment were almost entirely absent and had to be improvised from scratch. After repeated failures, they succeeded in 1957, naming their first watch 'QIANJIN' (前进, 'Move Forward'). The Andong Watch Factory was founded the following year to put it into production.
The brand's identity took its final shape through a sequence of mergers and renamings across the following decades. In 1961 the Andong Watch Factory merged with the Shenyang Watch Factory to form the Liaoning Watch Factory, which released the ministry-approved A61 'LIAONING' watch in 1962. By 1970 the factory — now employing hundreds of watchmakers — had independently designed the 17-jewel 'WANNIANQING' (Evergreen) watch and the nationally leading 'HONGQI' (Red Flag) calendar watch, producing 150,000 units that year alone. In 1973 the HONGQI-brand unified movement watch entered production and was renamed 'KONGQUE' — Peacock — completing the brand's first true transformation. By 1976 the factory had become the first in China capable of producing complete watches and every original component in-house, including cases, dials, jewels, shock absorbers, hairsprings, and mainsprings. Production passed one million units in 1979; by 1980 Peacock watches were in such demand that the brand was nicknamed 'the peacock that flies and never lands,' and Dandong earned the title 'the Orient's Geneva.' By the mid-1980s the factory employed 12,000 people and produced more than 3.8 million watches annually, the widest model range of any Chinese watchmaker at the time.
Today Peacock has repositioned itself around genuine tourbillon engineering, developing China's first dual-tourbillon with independently owned intellectual property, its two carriages positioned at 5 and 7 o'clock — a configuration that, alongside Swiss prestige maker Roger Dubuis, only these two manufacturers in the world currently produce. A subsequent three-year development produced Peacock's half-skeletonised tourbillon, also under independent IP: 146 components and 19 jewels compressed into a 0.4-gram assembly with reinforced shock resistance, each plate hand-polished with unique patterns and cased in lightweight, heat-resistant carbon fibre, selected as the commemorative model for Peacock's 60th anniversary in 2017. The Black Hole Central Tourbillon, inspired by the 2019 imaging of an actual black hole that confirmed Einstein's century-old prediction, carries a fully skeletonised, see-through movement with hand-polished vortex texturing, a dial ring of luminescent forged carbon resembling cosmic nebulae, and a central tourbillon whose minute hand extends bilaterally in a spherical, symmetrically distributed form — a piece that won Gold at the Muse Design Awards 2023 and a further award at the German iF Design Awards 2024.
Recent collaborations have paired Peacock's tourbillon engineering with named master artisans: Master Wei for the hand-guilloché Plumage Gaze series, and Master Zhao for the Divine Craft micro-engraved ultra-thin tourbillon. The current range spans the Classic, Adventurer, Avant, Dragon, Extraordinary, and Trendy tourbillon collections alongside dedicated Dress, Sport, Diver, and Guilloché lines, priced from roughly USD 1,399 for entry automatic divers to USD 49,999 for the most elaborate tourbillon references — positioning nearly seventy years of continuous Chinese watchmaking heritage at a fraction of comparable Swiss haute horlogerie pricing.