Ghosts, Caves, And Midnight: Catching Up With MING And The Alternative Horological Alliance

The story of Ming, the company, began in 2017 with the release of the 17.01, which debuted the fundamental design language still found in Ming watches today, and which offered an almost unbelievable value proposition: a sub-1000 dollar watch with a layered sapphire dial, adjusted to five positions, and with a nitrogen-filled case designed to prolong the time between needed service intervals. Over the next seven years, the number of different designs has proliferated to an astonishing degree, with movements and designs covering everything from multi-time zone watches to exotically complex chronographs, to vintage movements re-imagined in the context of Ming design.

One thing until recently, that all Ming releases have had in common, is that the watches were released as limited series (sometimes very limited; the Special Projects Cave watches, like the 20.01 Series 3, which were introduced as a separate category from the regular series production pieces in 2021, have been produced in some cases in runs of less than ten watches) and that they were only available directly from Ming itself. In 2024, however, Ming began to depart from strict adherence to those practices, introducing its first regular catalog piece, and has expanded its general release watch collection in 2025. 2025 has also seen an expansion in the Alternative Horological Alliance, which counted Ming, Fleming, and J.N. Shapiro as its first members.

The General Release Models: MING 37.02 Ghost, and 37.02 Minimalist

The 37.02 Minimalist was announced in October of last year, and the watch is from a design standpoint, immediately recognizable as a Ming design. It was designed from the ground up to be a daily wear watch. What that means at Ming, though, is a watch in which every aspect has been considered from a utility, ease of use, and aesthetics standpoint. The watch is time only, with no seconds hand, which means that you can pick it up and put it on immediately without worrying about setting it to the second or setting the date. The movement is a customized Sellita SW300, semi-skeletonized, with an anthracite finish – the caliber was chosen not only for its customizability but also for its reliability and ease of service. The rubber strap tapers in width and also in thickness, with a pass-through buckle, and it conforms very comfortably to the wrist as well as being a four season strap solution (without giving up anything to a leather strap in terms of style).

The dial is sapphire, with the hour markers etched into it, and filled with white lume. A couple of things about the markers: they delineate the hours with curved lines arranged in a non-repeating pattern, in which the breaks between the sections indicate the actual hours; they’re sort of regularly irregular and while they don’t shout for attention, the longer you look at them the more fascinating the arrangement becomes. The white lume isn’t just white by daylight; it actually glows white in the dark, which is a watchmaking first. Super-LumiNova comes in a lot of different colors but it’s never been used in pure white before, and Ming produced the color by combining different colored SLN pigments.

It’s a very satisfying watch to wear and it acquits itself admirably as a daily wear watch; I’ve been wearing mine regularly since the launch and it seems capable of being perennially interesting technically and aesthetically, as well as very satisfying to wear. 38mm x 11mm, CHF 3250.

The 37.02 Ghost was announced in April of this year, and shares the same basic 37xx series characteristics of the Minimalist – 38mm diameter, flared or pagoda style lugs, and the use of a Sellita caliber – in fact, the same Sellita caliber as the Minimalist; the Sellita SW300, customized with semi-skeletonized bridges and rotor, and anthracite plating.

The watch is according to Ming, inspired by architectural and industrial metal finishing and an interesting choice was made with respect to the materials. The case and two-part dial of the Ghost are made of Grade 2 titanium – this is elemental, pure titanium, unlike the alloyed Grade 5 titanium normally used in watchmaking (I say “elemental” although strictly speaking, Grade 2 does contain trace amounts of iron and oxygen). Grade 2 titanium has a slightly warmer tone than Grade 5 – I think that’s part of the secret behind the attractiveness of the Tudor Pelagos, which is in every respect about as pragmatic a piece of horological engineering as there is).

Grade 5 titanium is often used in the aerospace industry, where high strength is important and Grade 5 titanium, which thanks to its purity is more resistant to corrosion, is more often used in marine applications. Grade 2 titanium has an excellent strength to weight ratio and the Ghost is extremely light, at just 35 grams but thanks to the strength of the material, the case, which was originally designed for 100 meter water resistance, ended up being water resistant to 260 meters (Ming says that they kept the 100M rating stamp on the caseback as a sort of inside joke).

Grade 2 titanium is difficult to machine, which all titanium alloys are to some extent, but as it’s so pure the metal is what machinists refer to as “gummy” which means it tends to stick to the cutting edges of machine tools. You have to watch the cutting temperature as well as titanium oxidizes readily and the shavings can actually ignite if your cutter is moving too quickly. As Grade 2 titanium is nearly impossible to polish, the case and dial of the Ghost are treated with brushed and matte finishes, with the two part dial circular polished on the upper central disk, and radially polished on the ring underlying the luminous chapter ring on the lower surface of the crystal.

While decades of effort in the watch industry have gone into producing mirror finishes on Grade 5 titanium cases, the Ghost really leans into the intrinsic properties of titanium as a material and as a chemical element. In this respect, it’s actually a more Brutalist watch in some respects than a lot of other watches to which the name has been attached in recent years. This is the second general release watch from Ming, following on the Minimalist; the case is 38mm x 11mm; price, CHF 3500.

The Special Projects Cave Project 21, And The Ming 29.01 Midnight

The Special Projects Cave Project 21, says Ming Thein, was the result of being asked, at an event for collectors in Singapore, what kind of watch he would make, if he were making a watch just for himself? MT calls the result “a horological omakase.”

The idea is an interesting one and the result is certainly an unusual watch – in some respects, a classic dress watch at least in terms of dimensions and spareness of design, but the combination of materials and design makes this a highly idiosyncratic timepiece to say the least. Let’s start with the movement. For this watch MT chose the F. Piguet caliber 21, from which the project got its name. The F. Piguet caliber 21 has an extremely long history, having begun life in 1925 as the caliber 99; in 1955, with a redesign of the bridges and an increase in frequency to 21,600 vph from the original 18,000 vph, it became the 1.75mm thick caliber 21 and today it is still in production by Swatch Group as the Blancpain caliber 21.

The “omakase” version of the caliber 21

A remarkable history; for Project 21, Ming acquired new old stock F. Piguet 21 movements which were then extensively reworked, with new plates and bridges. The collectors present at the “omakase” event received versions of the movement with a skeletonized, blued titanium center bridge, and subsequently, a small series of 15 were produced, with the plates and bridges color matched to the dial.

This movement was then matched to a case just 35mm x 6.9mm (the caliber 21 is a small movement, 20mm x 1.75mm) which was machined from tantalum, a material whose use in watchmaking is relatively recent and which remains rare thanks to the difficulties involved in machining it. Tantalum is extremely dense and has a tendency to stick to cutting tools, and to make the cases, Ming turned to Josh Shapiro, whose brand, J. N. Shapiro, is part of the Alternative Horological Alliance. The case machining process was documented by Ming and Shapiro and highlights the problems encountered in machining tantalum in general, and machining it to the complex case shape of the Project 21 in particular. Part of the reason tantalum was chosen was for its heft – MT wanted a classically sized dress watch but one which felt more substantial than you’d ordinarily find in a watch that size.

Finally, the dial is a two part construction – the upper layer is borosilicate glass, etched with femtosecond laser bursts using the same technique developed for the 20.01.

The result is a highly unusual combination of modern materials, Ming’s unique design vocabulary, and a piece of horological history with a longevity not matched by any other movement. Price at launch was CHF 32,500, long since sold out.

Finally, the Ming 29.01 Midnight is a new take on the world time complication, which Ming first produced as the 19.02, in 2019. The 19.02 was followed in 2023 by the 29.01, which introduced a rotating dial, and a new case design with a bezel-less construction in which the dial merges seamlessly with the case.

The 29.01 Midnight has the same implementation of the world time complication as its predecessors – the dial rotates once every 24 hours, against a static city ring and the 24 hour dial can be adjusted independently. As with the 29.01, the Midnight is powered by the Schwarz-Etienne for MING Cal. ASE 222, 31 jewel microrotor caliber. The case, in keeping with the Midnight name, is black DLC-coated Grade 5 titanium and as with the original 29.01, the use of copious luminous material is not just for the sake of legibility, it’s in the service of the design overall. Produced in a series of 25 pieces; price, CHF 22,000.

The Alternative Horological Alliance

The AHA has added two additional members this year – Fears, and Massena Lab (with whom Ming has already collaborated). The AHA launched its first project last year – a tantalum bracelet, designed to fit tantalum watches from what were then all the AHA members’ tantalum watches.

So far no new group projects have been announced specifically this year but I expect we’ll be seeing more in the pipeline later in 2025. And, of course, the machining expertise at J. N. Shapiro was an essential part of the realization of project 21.

As a general rule we look at watch brands in the context of new releases and we don’t often step back and take a bigger picture look at the trajectory a company is following over a longer period of time, but I think Ming makes a very interesting case study. The introduction of non-limited, regular catalog models as well as the engagement with a retail network, represents a major shift in what started out as essentially a passion project, but which has in the last seven years expanded to a major international presence in the world of independent watchmaking and watchmaking in general. Such an expansion comes with risks, including the perception on the part of collectors and enthusiasts that the company’s vision and identity are being diluted.

Ming has I think, taken an interesting tack in the last twelve months – the non-limited regular production models retain much if not all of the thought and care of the limited edition models, and the latter continue to show great imagination and engagement with pushing the company’s own design language boundaries, albeit on a much smaller scale (naturally) than the regular production pieces. Neither shows any sign of dilution of company identity and the regular production models don’t cannibalize or diminish the value proposition of the smaller batch projects, and perhaps most importantly, all of the watches introduced this year have one critical thing in common – the more you find out about them, the more interesting they become.