CULTURAL CACHET

Parmigiani Fleurier reaffirms its love for calendar functions with the Tonda PF Xiali Calendar

- ASHOK SOMAN

While we were busily assembling and curating a list of festive Chinese New Year watches for 2023, Parmigiani Fleurier came out of left-field with the 42mm Tonda PF Xiali Calendar in steel, with trademark knurled platinum bezel. Ultimately, that list went nowhere because we ran out of pages, but we had to save this one piece. Going well beyond a thematic Year of the Rabbit novelty approach, the Xiali Calendar is a complete Chinese calendar; in fact, xiali means Chinese traditional complete calendar, which means that this watch has two calendars in its name. Technically, the Chinese calendar combines features of both solar and lunar calendars so there are two calendars in play. This means that there is a lot of complexity to go through here, because the Chinese calendar cannot be turned into a perpetual calendar. So yes, the Xiali Calendar is an annual calendar. According to the manufacture, calendar complications are a personal pleasure for Michel Parmigiani, hence the focus on them. Given that this is the case, let us first begin by looking at what the Chinese calendar tracks. We are no experts on non-Gregorian calendar systems so we will have to take all this at face value. Caveat emptor, as they say.

To begin with the combination of solar and lunar indications, these are synchronised by the addition of a 13th month. This allows both cycles to coincide every three years, approximately. Just considering the word ‘approximately’ there must have given the watchmakers pause, but there is more! The solar year is divided into 24 periods, not the 12 we are accustomed to; and new years are mechanically challenging because it is always the arrival of spring, which for the Xiali Calendar is some time between January 21 and February 19 (the second new moon after winter solstice, if you want to go down this rabbit hole).