France and China established diplomatic relations in January 1964, and fifty years later F.P. Journe marked the anniversary with a version of the Automatique Lune that has since become one of the harder things in the catalog to find. The dial is blue, which was an unusual choice for this reference, with gold numerals surfaced using a diamond tool and a France - Chine 50 logo applied to the face. The case is platinum at 40 mm across. Everything else is the standard Automatique Lune: hours and minutes from the center, small seconds at 4:30, a large date, the power reserve at 9 o'clock and a moon phase, driven by the automatic calibre 1300.3. It was built between 2014 and 2016, and it has not been made since.
Blue was not a color Journe reached for casually at this point in the catalog's history, which is part of why the dial reads as deliberate rather than merely decorative. The plate is finished in a deep blue and carries hour numerals in gold whose surfaces have been cut with a diamond tool, leaving the fine directional grain the manufacture uses across its worked dials, so the figures catch light along one axis and separate from the blue by texture rather than by brightness. The commemorative logo sits openly on the dial rather than being tucked away on the caseback, which is a bolder decision than it sounds; a mark of that kind can very easily unbalance a face already carrying a date aperture, a moon and a reserve indication. Rhodium plated steel hands were fitted in place of the blued ones used on the silver-dial versions, for the entirely obvious reason that blued hands on a blue dial would simply disappear into it. The platinum case is 40 mm across and 10.6 mm tall, with a sapphire crystal in the back showing the rose gold movement. Platinum was the right metal for it as well, since a white case keeps the blue cold rather than pushing it toward violet, which a red gold case would have done.
The movement is the standard calibre 1300.3, and nothing whatever about the commemoration altered it, but it is worth setting out what that specification actually contains. The mainspring is a meter long, which is roughly double what a conventional automatic carries, and it is the direct reason the watch runs for five days rather than for two. The balance is free-sprung and measures 10.1 mm across, regulated by four small inertia weights set into its rim rather than by an index bearing on the hairspring, an arrangement that is slower to adjust in the first place and holds its rate considerably better over the years that follow. Winding is unidirectional, through an off-center rotor cast in 22K gold and running on a self-locking ball bearing, an arrangement Journe adopted because a conventionally pivoted rotor could not keep a barrel of this size adequately fed. The whole assembly runs to 271 parts and 36 jewels, beats at 21,600 alternations per hour, and is built on plates and bridges of solid 18K rose gold rather than brass. Autonomy reaches about 160 hours in total, with the first 120 underwritten as chronometric, and that second figure is the one the manufacture actually stands behind. The gap between the two is the tail it declines to make claims about.
Journe does not do limited editions in the way the industry ordinarily understands them, and the numbers attached to this one explain why the watch has become so difficult to find. Reports of the initial release describe ten pieces only, one allocated to each F.P. Journe boutique worldwide, with further examples made to order in the period afterward; the total is generally believed to run to fewer than thirty examples in all, and the manufacture has never published an official figure for it. Set that figure against an annual output of roughly 900 watches across the entire catalog and the scale of the thing becomes clear: this amounts to a rounding error inside a production run that was already very small indeed. The manufacture's approach to editions is consistent with that. Rather than announcing a numbered series and then building precisely to that number, Journe tends to make a specific thing for a specific occasion and allow the eventual quantity to follow whatever demand turns up, which produces editions whose true size nobody quite knows, the manufacture itself sometimes included. It is an unhelpful habit for anyone attempting to compile a census, and an entirely honest one in every other respect, since nothing is being manufactured to hit a number chosen for its resonance.
This is a watch bought for what it commemorates quite as much as for what it is, and the buyer will generally know precisely why they want this one rather than another. A blue dial on a platinum Automatique Lune is attractive enough on its own terms and would certainly have found buyers without any anniversary attached, but the logo makes the piece specific, and that specificity is the entire point of it. Anyone uninterested in the commemoration itself should simply buy one of the standard executions instead, since the mark on the dial is permanent and cannot be read as anything other than what it is. Given how few of them exist, provenance carries real weight here, and any documentation tying a particular watch to the 2014 release or to a specific boutique allocation is well worth having. Beyond all of that, the checks are simply the reference's own: the date jumping cleanly and instantaneously at midnight, the reserve indication working across the length of its scale, the moon advancing correctly through a full cycle, and the diamond-tooled numerals still intact under raking light.
