In this current age of watchmaking, complications previously reserved for the highest echelons of haute horlogerie have been made far more accessible to the average enthusiast than ever before. Nowadays, even tourbillons have become surprisingly affordable, but this doesn’t necessarily hold true for this exotic escapement’s more flamboyant sibling – the central tourbillon. Making a tourbillon the literal and figurative centerpiece of a watch design is generally reserved for high-impact, high-dollar statement horology, but young Chinese marque CIGA Design has taken up the challenge of bringing the central tourbillon into far more mass-market territory. Beyond just bringing a central tourbillon to an entry-level luxury price point, the new CIGA Design Central Tourbillon Mount Everest Homage Edition brings in a wild, stylized visual tribute to the first-ever successful summit of Mount Everest with unique visual flourishes and appropriately exotic materials.
At 45mm wide, the CIGA Design Central Tourbillon Mount Everest Homage Edition’s titanium alloy case is likely to carry a bold wearing presence, but its fully lugless form should make it somewhat more approachable for smaller wrists. The overall impression is aggressive, blocky, and purposeful in initial images, with a silhouette dominated by gear-toothed polished bezel claws at each of the hours save 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock. The main body of the bezel itself is almost elementally simple, with a vertically raised, radially brushed inner section adorned with an engraved triangle at 12 o’clock and counterbalanced by the brand’s engraved logo at 6 o’clock. Outside of the brushed and polished flourishes of the bezel, the main case is simple and to the point, with a crisp cylindrical form and a matte-blasted overall finish. CIGA Design echoes this rugged, muscular feel through the CNC-machined signed crown, which features a set of deep, chunky gear teeth that should make for easy operation and handling on the wrist. It’s around back, however, that this case truly shines in photos. CIGA Design surrounds the sapphire display caseback with a crisply engraved, polished, and matte-blasted line of text. This line, “It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves,” is attributed to Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man ever to summit the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest. Despite all the trappings of durability and the mountaineering aspirations, however, the CIGA Design Central Tourbillon Mount Everest Homage Edition is a rather fragile piece, with a water resistance rating of only 30 meters (not that many wearers are likely to take this central tourbillon watch up the side of a mountain, though).
For the dial of the Central Tourbillon Mount Everest Homage Edition, CIGA Design opts for an offbeat blend of airy minimalism with dramatically stylized elements. There are no scales or indices here to mar the dial surface, and the only printed dial element whatsoever is a stylized silhouette of Mount Everest at 12 o’clock with a small line of text displaying the height of the summit in meters. This gives the dial surface itself an immense amount of visual negative space in images, allowing the texture and nuance of the material to take prominence. The brand renders this dial in a deep, charcoal gray slice of raw stone, harvested by CIGA Design from the base of Mount Everest itself. While the brand is vague on the exact type of stone used here, the pitting, grooves, and raised areas of this rugged matte surface are nonetheless striking in initial photos. To further this connection with the mountain, CIGA Design fits the watch with a wild, heavily stylized polished handset fashioned to resemble ice axes. With such a dramatically unorthodox hand design and the only hour or minute markers relegated to the bezel, the CIGA Design Central Tourbillon Mount Everest Homage Edition can be difficult to read in photos, but the brand does top the hands with small recessed triangles to aid in orientation. In addition, both hands are engraved with inspirational words – “Courage” for the hours hand, and “Exploration” for the minutes. As a final stylized touch, the minutes hand is also fitted with tiny enameled flags for each of the four groups involved in the first summit of Mount Everest in 1953 – India, Nepal, Great Britain, and the United Nations. These offbeat hands are likely to be a love-it-or-hate-it addition to the design, but they effectively visually connect the watch to the theme of Mount Everest. Naturally, the cutout central tourbillon display is the real focal point of this design, however. Equipped with a polished, skeletonized three-arm tourbillon cage and an impressively open view of the movement below, this escapement might not challenge the finishing of Swiss central tourbillons in photos but it undeniably delivers a potent dose of horological drama in images. Oddly, despite the watch’s release in 2024, the raised, text-laden ring surrounding the tourbillon still references the 70th anniversary of the first Everest summit in 2023 – likely an artifact left over from the watch’s lengthy production cycle.
The CD-05 hand-wound central tourbillon movement inside the CIGA Design Central Tourbillon Mount Everest Homage Edition is heavily modified by the brand, and offers a hefty 120-hour power reserve at a 21,600 bph beat rate. Interestingly, CIGA Design hides most of the CD-05 beneath nearly full, text-laden engraved bridges, leaving only the tourbillon and mainspring barrel visible in images. Granted, much of the novelty and visual appeal of this watch is simply due to it having a central tourbillon at all at this price point, but a more skeletonized approach to movement finishing would arguably be more impactful here. To complete the watch, CIGA Design fits the Central Tourbillon Mount Everest Homage Edition with a contoured quick-release strap in black rubber. The brand ties this sporty strap in with the overall theme strikingly in images, finishing the upper surfaces with a rugged, naturalistic stone texture. In addition, this strap features embossed badges commemorating the 70th anniversary of the first successful summit of Mount Everest.
Even in the modern age of accessible complications, central tourbillon designs still command a certain level of spectacle and rarely make their way into more mass-market watches. The new CIGA Design Central Tourbillon Mount Everest Homage Edition successfully brings this shock-and-awe escapement to the masses, complete with a uniquely stylized presentation and a compelling connection to one of Earth’s greatest natural wonders. The CIGA Design Central Tourbillon Mount Everest Homage Edition is available now through the brand’s e-commerce platform. MSRP for this watch stands at an impressively accessible $3,600 USD as of press time. For more information, please visit the brand’s website.
