Chinese Horology

China has an ancient independent tradition of mechanised timekeeping predating European mechanical clocks, most famously Su Song's astronomical clock tower of 1092 CE, a water-powered mechanism with an escapement-like linkwork device that some historians of technology regard as a conceptual ancestor of the mechanical escapement, though it developed independently of, and considerably earlier than, the verge escapement tradition that later arose in Europe.

From the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, European (initially Jesuit missionary-mediated) mechanical clocks and watches entered the Chinese imperial court and elite market, and the Qing imperial court became a major patron and collector of elaborate European-made and European-influenced automaton clocks, many of which survive today in the Palace Museum, Beijing, representing an important East-West horological exchange rather than an indigenous mechanical-watch manufacturing industry in the Western sense.

Modern Chinese watch manufacturing developed principally in the twentieth century, with state-directed factories established in the 1950s (notably in Tianjin and Shanghai) producing mechanical wristwatches for the domestic market, and China has since become, by volume, one of the largest producers of watch movements and complete watches globally, spanning inexpensive mass-market products and, increasingly, higher-grade domestic mechanical movement manufacturing.