Sea-Gull is the house that built the Chinese watch industry. Founded in 1955 as the Tianjin Watch Factory, it produced China's first domestically made mechanical wristwatch — the Five-Star, or Wuxing — within a hundred days of opening, and it has spent seven decades since then turning that head start into industrial scale. Today it describes itself as China's largest manufacturer of mechanical watch movements, with an output of more than two million calibres a year, and it runs a nationally certified technical centre and an industrial design hub alongside the factory. Its calibres carry the ST prefix and are found far beyond its own dials, which is why a great many enthusiasts have owned a Sea-Gull movement without ever owning a Sea-Gull.
The brand's own catalogue is unusually wide for a single manufacturer, running from a 42-dollar strap to a 41,000-dollar double tourbillon, with the bulk of the watches sitting between roughly 200 and 900 dollars. Almost everything is mechanical, cased in 316L stainless steel under synthetic sapphire, and sold with a two-year warranty — three years on the high complications. In 2025 the company opened its first direct-to-consumer global site at en.seagullwatch.com, so the range that used to reach the rest of the world through grey-market channels is now sold under the factory's own name.
The watch that anchors the range is the 1963. In 1963 the Tianjin factory developed China's first aviation chronograph, the D304, for the air force, and the modern reissues rebuild it around the hand-wound column-wheel ST1901 — 22 jewels, 21,600 vph — in a 40 mm steel case 14.35 mm thick with a sapphire display back, at 879 dollars. The family has since branched into a smaller 37.3 mm version at 999 dollars in Polar Night, Aurora and panda-dial variants with a more finely finished ST19, and a meteorite-dial limited edition at 1,599. The other heritage line revisits the origin story directly: the 1955 Wuxing Five Stars reissue, a 39 mm dress watch 11.4 mm thick in 1.4435 steel, running the automatic ST2130 under a blue enamel dial sprinkled with silver, at 1,629 dollars.
The modern half of the catalogue is led by the Ocean Series, the brand's dive line: 200 metres of water resistance, ST2130 automatic, 39 mm at 12.6 mm thick with a gradient metallic dial and calendar at 879 dollars, or a 43.5 mm GMT at 429. Around them sit the Expedition and Excellence lines of dress and calendar watches — full calendar and open-heart pieces from about 189 dollars, cloud-motif and Qingjia dials in the 400 to 500 range — and a women's collection of 27 to 34 mm watches from roughly 219 dollars.
What separates Sea-Gull from most volume manufacturers is the top of its own range. In the 2000s it became the first Chinese house to build a tourbillon, a minute repeater and a perpetual calendar in-house, and in 2009 it combined all three in the ST9250 — the tri-complication that remains its signature technical claim. The Heritage tourbillons sit at 3,509 to 3,629 dollars with guilloché dials, power reserve and calendar in a 41 mm case; the Master Series double tourbillon runs the 39-jewel ST8080 with a 40-hour reserve in a 43 mm case at 40,999. The 70th anniversary in 2024 brought a flying rattrapante: the ST1961-2 split-seconds chronograph under a Muonionalusta meteorite dial in a grade-5 titanium case, 42.5 mm, limited and priced at 5,299 dollars. That same year the company introduced its first silicon hairspring tourbillon, and it also sells its calibres openly — tourbillon movements from 900 dollars, the ST2130 and the rest of the ST family listed as products in their own right.
