Latest Review
Ming has announced their latest release, a follow up to the 29.01 Worldtimer which launched in 2023. The new 29.01 Midnight is conceived as the flipside to the original, which was presented in titanium with a blue/black gradient dial. The new watch is a blacked out version, with a DLC coating on the titanium case, and a black dial with layers of sapphire and, as we often see with Ming, loaded with lume. The release follows a bit of a pattern we saw with the 37.09, which debuted with the bright and colorful Bluefin about one year ago, and saw a darker sibling emerge several months later with the Uni. The colorway of the 29.01 Midnight is, in fact, directly lifted from the Uni, providing yet another connection between Ming watch families.
The 29.01 is one of my personal favorite examples of Ming’s higher end, haute horlogery offerings, as the worldtimer format really allows the brand to flex a bit. While I think many probably associate Ming with a certain strain of minimalism, the 29.01, by necessity, is throwing a lot at you, and it’s a great accomplishment on Ming’s part that the watch is able to communicate so much so clearly.
Here’s how it works. The cities representing the world’s time zones are printed on a sapphire upper dial. Below that, a metal base dial with a very subtle grained finish has the 24 hour scale printed on it. Throughout the day, the base dial rotates so that the 24 hour scale lines up with the correct time in each world city, hour by hour. The centrally mounted hands, of course, always reflect local time. It’s actually a fairly elegant solution for a complication that is often quite difficult to get your head around, and of course it’s incredibly practical to have a readout of the current time in cities across the world at a glance.
Lume, as you’d expect, is everywhere, and one of the real pleasures of this type of watch from Ming. They’ve truly mastered the ability to inject luminescent material directly into sapphire, and that parlor trick is used to great effect here. According to Ming, every marking on the sapphire components (plus the hands) is lumed, which means that the city ring really puts on a show when things are fully charged. The numerals printed on the base dial’s 24 hour scale glow as well, in orange.
Another design quirk that adds to the drama of the watch is the lack of a bezel. Instead, the case body and sapphire crystal are connected directly, which gives the dial an expansive quality that would be lost otherwise. The case features Ming’s signature “flying blade” lug design, with a mix of polished and matte finishes. The watch is 40mm in diameter, and Ming notes that while it is one of the brand’s larger watches in terms of its measurements, the lugs on this case have been designed to be short to make it more wearable for a larger variety of wrist sizes.
The watch is powered by the ASE 222 caliber, a movement produced for Ming by Schwarz-Etienne with a microroter and an impressive 86 hour power reserve when fully wound. The caliber has been decorated with rose gold coated bridges and diamond cut (machine made) anglage, as well as a skeletonzed barrel.
The 29.01 Midnight is available to order now through Ming and their authorized retailers. Only 25 will be produced, and the retail price is $26,000. Deliveries are expected in June. Ming
