Understand the problem first, because the watch is the answer to it. The traditional Chinese calendar is lunisolar. Its months follow the moon, at twenty-nine or thirty days; its years follow the sun; and the two are reconciled by inserting a leap month in seven years out of nineteen — by rules tied to the solar terms, not a fixed schedule a cam can memorise. Layer on the sixty-year sexagenary cycle, twelve zodiac animals and twenty-four solar terms, and you have a calendar a mechanical watch has no business tracking. In perpetual form, no watch ever had, before this one.
Vacheron Constantin unveiled the Berkley at Watches and Wonders Geneva in April 2024. It is a double-sided pocket watch in 18k white gold, 98 mm across, built by three master watchmakers in the bespoke Les Cabinotiers department over eleven years — one of them given entirely to assembly, including a trial assembly. Its Calibre 3752 runs to 2,877 components and 245 jewels, driving 31 hands and 9 discs.
The count that made the headlines is 63 complications, in nine families: time measurement, a Gregorian perpetual calendar, the Chinese perpetual calendar, a Chinese agricultural perpetual calendar, astronomical indications, a split-seconds chronograph, alarms, a grande sonnerie with Westminster carillon — five gongs, five hammers, the Big Ben melody — and additional functions including world time. A triple-axis armillary tourbillon, beating at 18,000 vibrations per hour, regulates the assembly. On debut it was billed, accurately at that date, as the world's most complicated watch, passing the Maison's own Reference 57260 of 2015 and its 57 complications.
The Chinese system is where the engineering concentrates. The watch displays the sexagenary cycle, the year's zodiac sign, the five elements and yin-yang indications, each month's number and length, leap months when they fall, and the solar terms — all programmed through 2200. That end date is the honest part of the specification: a perpetual calendar is a program, and every program has a horizon. The Gregorian side needed the arithmetic of a regular calendar. The Chinese side needed the arithmetic of an irregular one, cut into metal.
The watch is a private commission, made for the collector whose name it carries, William R. Berkley — the same commissioner behind the Reference 57260. It is a unique piece, and Vacheron Constantin publishes no price for it. None is reported here: any public figure would be a guess.
Previously's Take
Complication counts make easy headlines and miss the point. Most of these functions had been done before, in some form. The Chinese calendar family — following the moon, the sun and a sixty-year cycle at once, without drifting — is the one that took the decade. The Berkley is not impressive because it does the most, but because it does the thing that was supposed to be mechanically unreasonable.
The numbers
Sources · 4 sources
- Vacheron Constantin — The Berkley Grand Complication (maker's presentation)
- Hodinkee, April 2024 — "The Most Complicated Watch in the World"
- Monochrome Watches, April 9, 2024 — technical specifications
- SJX Watches, April 2024 — in-depth examination
Photographs: Vacheron Constantin · Vacheron Constantin · Hodinkee
