Feature: Why Are These Rolexes Some Of The World’s Most Collectable?
Being a sheikh in an oil-rich Middle Eastern country has its perks. You get to live in huge palaces bedecked with gold-leaf and fine Italian marble, own car collections big enough to fill aircraft hangars.
You can also hand out lavish gifts to friends, employees and visiting foreign dignitaries, like some desert-dwelling Santa Claus—which is not something democratically elected Western leaders can do, beholden as they are to the scrupulous eye of the taxpayer.
It’s not known exactly when the sheikhs and sultans of the Middle East first began commissioning batches of special-order luxury watches for them to give away as gifts. However, the first models appear to be from the early 1950s and were made by Patek Philippe, Universal Geneve and Piaget for the Saudi Arabian royal family.
These 18k yellow or pink gold wrist watches—or sometimes pocket watches—usually featured enamel dials bearing a portrait of King Ibn Saud or his successor Saud Bin Abdulaziz and were simple, elegant pieces marking, for example, a coronation or anniversary.
A Patek Philippe gold pocket watch featuring a portrait of King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia. Image courtesy of Bonhams
Fit For A Prince, Or Sheikh
Around this time, Saudi Arabia was newly awash in oil money. The wealthy princes of the kingdom, their pockets bulging with cash, would have travelled abroad for the first time, visiting the capitals of Europe and discovering luxury watch brands like Patek Philippe and Rolex.
They in turn would have brought back their knowledge of these brands, sharing it with the royal families of neighbouring countries. A Dubai sheikh might have admired the Oyster Perpetual on the wrist of a friend and fancied one for himself, perhaps finding the name itself attractive since the emirate of Dubai began life as a pearl fishing village.
That regal crown logo wouldn’t have done any harm either.
A 1964 Rolex Oysterdate bearing the Saudi Fund For Development logo. Image courtesy of Bonhams
Rolex co-founder Hans Wilsdorf also played his part in promoting the brand in the region. He’s known to have visited Bahrain and Egypt during this time, probably other countries too, meeting jewellery dealers, potential clients and the like.
No surprise, then, that Rolex’s reputation spread far and wide extremely quickly. As with the rest of the world, it was becoming the most coveted watch brand among the Middle East’s wealthy elite.
From Bedouin To Bling
By the 1960s, Rolex watches had become the go-to choice for Arabian royalty. A grainy photo of the late Sheikh Zayed, founder of the United Arab Emirates, taken in the mid-1960s shows him in traditional Arabian garb sporting a shiny steel Day-Date, also known as the ‘President’—an apt watch for a great leader.
The Arabian Peninsula was a thrilling place to be in the mid 20th century, with the discovery of vast new oil reserves, the occasional communist uprising and ambitious sheikhs eager to turn their sleepy coastal villages into thrusting modern metropolises like New York. For centuries a dirt-poor backwater populated by Bedouin tribes, it was now swarming with businessmen, diplomats and foreign oil company representatives clamouring for a piece of the action.
A Rolex Day-Date with dial inscription reading Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE. Image courtesy of Bonhams
Arab leaders used luxury watches for a number of things: state gifts, simple tokens of gratitude, rewards for high-ranking military types, and… well, the greasing of palms.
So Middle Eastern countries began buying large quantities of Rolex watches, mainly sourced from jewellers such as Asprey in London who were also asked to customise the dials (no, they didn’t leave the Rolex factory looking like that).
Soon, from Manama to Muscat, in what was very much a case of keeping up with the Joneses, every royal family or state department wanted their national symbol, signature or military insignia printed on the dial of a shiny new Rolex.
Logos Galore!
No doubt a full-colour coffee-table book will one day be published about the weird and wonderful Rolexes of Arabia (‘Dials In The Desert’?). Enough of them exist, certainly, to fill a few hundred pages.
There are Air Kings featuring the government crests of Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, Rolex Datejusts bearing the logo of the Bahrain Police Force or Kuwait Army, Submariners with Omani khanjar daggers, and—perhaps the coolest of the lot—GMT 1675s emblazoned with the golden eagle of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Ministry of Defence.
A Rolex Air-King, reference 5500, with the emblem of Saudi Arabia. Image courtesy of Bonhams
Indeed, the UAE’s golden eagle logo seems to have adorned the most popular Rolex tool watches as it also appeared on a Daytona reference 6263. One particularly rare version sees the word ‘Rolex’ replaced with the eagle and carries no text on the dial except for the signature of the Ministry of Defence in Arabic script. One of these fetched a little over £250,000 at a Phillips Auction in 2018, which makes these watches perhaps the most desirable, after the Paul Newman models.
A very rare Rolex Daytona Khanjar dial associated with Oman. Image courtesy of Bonhams
Given the prices they now fetch, it's crazy to think that some collectors, having acquired these UAE models fairly cheaply before the mechanical watch revival, actually changed the dial, convinced no one would care about the logo of a country few people had ever heard of.
Khanjar Dials
Perhaps the most prominent Arab-dial Rolexes are the ones bearing the khanjar dagger that were given away by the long-reigning Sultan Qaboos of Oman. The sultan, who died in 2020, was not only an avid watch collector himself but a progressive and generous leader with impeccable taste.
A man who refused to let his capital city, Muscat, get overrun with modern skyscrapers—preferring traditional architecture—Sultan Qaboos also commissioned a number of Rolex Day-Dates bearing the Omani khanjar logo, many with lacquered Stella dials.
Only last year, a platinum Day-Date from circa 1975 featuring a sunburst blue dial with a red khanjar, coupled with diamond hour markers, sold for an impressive £135,365 at a Hong Kong auction.
This 18k gold Rolex Day-Date was owned by the commander of Oman's armed forces. Image courtesy of Bonhams
One with a blood-orange Stella dial and green khanjar insignia that was gifted to Colonel Tony Lewis, a British soldier who later became commander of the sultan’s armed forces, sold for just under £60k at Bonhams in 2020—which seems like an absolute steal in today’s market.
Several other Rolexes were gifted to members of the British special forces soldiers for their help in defeating communist rebels in the civil war that was waged in Oman from 1963-76. These, backed up with documentation, would now fetch sky-high prices. So if your grandad ever talks with misty-eyed nostalgia about fighting in the Dhofar Rebellion, slip him a sleeping pill and go rummage in the bottom of his sock draw. You never know…
Day-Dates weren’t the only Rolexes the sultan gave away. A yellow-gold Cosmograph reference 6265, with a khanjar engraving on the caseback (though not on the dial), sold for £135,000 at the Phillips Geneva Watch Auction in 2018. And there were a handful of incredible khanjar-logo yellow-gold Submariner 1680s, one of which sold for around £200k in 2018.
A khanjar Rolex Daytona that the sultan gave to an English pilot who had just flown him from Muscat to Rome for a state visit fetched a whopping £600k when auctioned at Christies in 2017.
Sultan Qaboos sounds like the dream boss to us!
Why Are They So Desirable?
You could say these watches comprise a ‘perfect storm’ of desirability. They’re Rolex, they’re vintage, they have historical interest and unconventional dials. Plus, they’re perhaps the closest thing Rolex has to limited editions, even if they were not officially issued—or even sanctioned—by Rolex, who seem to have kept characteristically tight-lipped on the matter.
A stainless steel GMT made for the UAE Ministry of Defence, 1977. Image: ©Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo
Understandably, wealthy watch collectors from the Middle East are keen to own one and that keeps prices buoyant. Furthermore, these pieces also boast that uber-rare Rolex novelty factor without being frivolous in the way that, say, the infamous Domino’s Pizza dial Air-King is.
Let’s be brutally honest here. What would you rather have staring up at you from the face of your watch? A picture of a golden eagle, or what looks like the cardboard box of a global fast-food chain favoured by stoned college students?
There really is no contest.
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