Cissy Ngan Walks Us Through Her Horological Picks for Christie’s Spring Auctions

Christie’s Hong Kong Spring season auction is well underway. The auction house has carefully curated numerous fine and rare items in several categories including wine, handbags, jewellery, and or category of focus today, watches.

This showing also marks the last one at the exhibition center before Christie’s moves into its new home in the new world-class building designed by Zaha Hadid Architects — The Henderson.

Joined by watch specialist Cissy Ngan, we explore three of her personal favourites and learn what makes them so special. Starting with a more recent star that’s been producing amazing results at auctions, the Cartier Crash early Paris Case was chosen. Ngan has this as one of her picks for what it represents now, and also what it represented at the time of its introduction with its defiant case shape and design in a sea of traditional dress watches.

Next is not quite a wristwatch but a very significant piece of horology in the Patek Philippe “The Triumph of Neptune” pocket watch. Crafted in 1976, this pocket watch depicts the actual painting in diptych engraving and was officially produced by Patek Philippe with an official box, and it even has a malachite and gold stand for display purposes.

While the Patek Philippe Nautilus is nothing new to the seasoned watch collector, the reference Ngan selected was an interesting one. This was not the 5711 nor the 3800 but a 32mm 3900. She comments that she likes the “cute” nature of this size of Nautilus, and while she has come across a few 3900 Nautilus watches in the past, none were in 18k white gold. She suspects this variant of the Nautilus 3900 in white gold with the blue dial to be the production range of around 40-50 examples.

As a bonus, Ngan brought out multiple variants of the Nautilus for comparison, from a Tiffany & Co.-stamped 5711, the final edition 5711 green dial, and even the iced-out 5719. Stay tuned as we report back with the final hammer prices on these highly-coveted timepieces.