IWC Schaffhausen

Fong – the scion of a family of renowned restaurateurs with a history of first class restaurants in Macau and Hong Kong going back sixty years – had always been fascinated by all things military. In his youth, he glued together hundreds of Airfix model airplanes, tanks and other military equipment. Marriage, two daughters and thirty-odd years’ employment with the same company never managed to break his boyish collectors’ spirit: “The only thing that changed was that I began to buy the models ready-made when I got married,” he admits. “I no longer had the time to assemble them myself.” Collecting watches, however, caused no problems at all. SC Fong’s wife, who runs her own textile business, is an even more avid watch collector than he is. “She actually has more watches than I. Over a hundred. This is the reason I can buy a lot of watches myself. My wife allows me to!” His elder daughter, aged 27, has been stung by the bug, too. Hers is a collection of Swatches going into the several hundred. A Fong family holiday will never be short of a few watch shop visits and a souvenir or two.

SC Fong has recently taken early retirement from his position as the head of production in Asia of an educational publishing group because – as he quips – he wanted to spend more time with his dog. Jun-Jun is an elegant, six-year-old golden retriever. She will be familiar to all readers of the IWC Forum where she makes frequent appearances, sporting SC’s latest acquisition around one of her fine paws. Every morning, SC drives into the hills behind Hong Kong for an hour-long walk with Jun-Jun. Suitably awoken and refreshed, he will then spend three or four hours at the computer, perusing a large variety of watch collectors’ sites and forums all over the world. One of these, an IWC forum in Chinese, he moderates himself. This forum has an astonishing 15,000 members.