Shanghai Watch Flagship Store: Time and the City

Shanghai has always been a city in dialogue with the world. Since its port opened in the 19th century, it has stood as China’s most cosmopolitan crossroads: a place where East and West blended into a singular culture of refinement, ambition and style. Over the decades, the city’s red-brick lanes and Art Deco towers have framed a restless pursuit of modernity. Out of this setting emerged a watchmaker whose story is inseparable from that of Shanghai itself.

Founded in 1955, Shanghai Watch is the only Chinese horological brand named after a city. Its origins were modest—a petition by four watchmakers to the government—but its impact was not. Within months it produced the country’s first extra-small wristwatches, marking the beginning of a national industry. Zhou Enlai, China’s premier, wore a Shanghai watch faithfully until the end of his life, cementing the brand’s place in the collective memory. By the mid-1990s, Shanghai accounted for a quarter of all Chinese watch production. Later, its movements would travel aboard the Shenzhou VII spacecraft, testimony to its technical progress and ambition.

For much of the 20th century, a Shanghai watch was one of the city’s “Old Three” must-have possessions—a marker of taste as coveted as the foreign goods displayed in shop windows along Nanjing Road. Today, six decades on, the brand is reinventing itself, positioning not as a relic of state-industry but as a house of horological craft for a new generation of collectors.

The rebirth has a symbolic address: Nanjing West Road, once known as the “Street of Clocks and Watches.” Here stands the Shanghai Watch Flagship Store, a space conceived less as a shop than as a gallery of time. Its design fuses the rigour of Art Deco with the restraint of modern minimalism—black and white tones sharpened by quiet accents of black-gold, plum and distilled blue. Classical parquet sits beside mirrored glass, while arcs meet straight lines in a deliberate dialogue between past and future.

In this setting, Shanghai Watch signals its ambition to play on the same stage as global luxury brands. It is not simply reviving a name from China’s industrial past, but articulating a modern identity rooted in heritage, innovation and metropolitan culture.

For Shanghai Watch, a timepiece is more than an accessory; it is a vessel of memory and an emblem of the city’s spirit. To wear one is to carry a fragment of Shanghai’s story—one that stretches from its golden age of cosmopolitan modernity to a present moment when Chinese luxury seeks, once again, to define time on its own terms.