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Selten's Yum Cha turns a dim sum steamer lid into a grand feu enamel dial
The Yum Cha is Selten's collaboration with Hong Kong collector club Watch Ho & Co, and its grand feu enamel dial is hand-engraved as a bamboo steamer lid. A run of 100 at US$4,950.
Hen & Mills Editorial · 3 min read · 12 August 2026
Watch Ho & Co is a Hong Kong collector community and it has just turned three. The anniversary watch is a collaboration with Selten, it's called the Yum Cha, and its dial is the lid of a bamboo dim sum steamer. Orders opened on 11 August. There are 100 of them at US$4,950.
The dial copies that weave at 1:1. Not a texture loosely suggesting cane, the actual pattern, cut into silver by hand.
Roughly 3,500 cuts in one silver disc
Master Qin maps the plate into about eighty rectangles, then carves more than forty parallel lines inside each one, under a microscope, with a tungsten graver. Slip once and the disc is scrap and he goes back to a blank. Eight hours of work go in before any enamel gets near it.
Every rectangle sits at a slightly different angle to the ones beside it, and the depth of cut shifts within each rectangle too. In photographs it reads as actual woven cane. Light catches one facet and skids straight off the next, so turn your wrist and the basket seems to move.
The hands are tea leaves, diamond cut with a frosted surface. That is the sort of idea that turns twee very easily. Somehow this one doesn't.
Enamel you can see straight through
The enamel is fumé grand feu, and Selten chose transparent over opaque deliberately so the engraving underneath stays visible. The raw powder is a dull beige. It goes on by hand, into the kiln at 800°C, out, cooled, inspected, and the whole cycle runs at least eight times. Get the temperature or the thickness slightly wrong and you have bubbles, cracks, or a warped silver base.
What survives comes out dark brown and see-through, with the bright-cut silver beneath throwing light back up through it. Then 90 minutes of hand polishing at steady, even pressure lifts the centre to honey gold, while the enamel pools thicker at the curved rim and stays a smoky amber.
Selten reckons about 16.5 hours go into each dial that makes it, after more than twenty prototypes and a rejection rate north of 40 per cent.
A Sellita with the automatic taken out
Inside is a Sellita SW200-2 M Power+. The M means hand-wound, so the automatic works are gone and the reserve stretches to 65 hours. It is adjusted in five positions to plus or minus 6 seconds a day, with 26 jewels and 28,800 vibrations an hour.
At five grand you might want more movement than a modified SW200, and I understand the instinct. You would be paying for the wrong thing. The money went into the dial, and the dial is the part you actually look at.
The case is 316L steel, 38mm across, 8.35mm thick without the crystal and 9.95mm with it, 44.5mm lug to lug and 20mm between the lugs. Water resistance is 5 ATM. The crystal is a top hat sapphire carrying eight AR layers inside and out, and the strap is hand-stitched Italian nubuck.
Three siu mai, three teacups, table three
The caseback is solid and stamped with an original illustration by @onehourwatch: a dim sum table seen from a small boy's chair, looking across at his grandparents. Three siu mai, three teacups, three pairs of chopsticks, table number three, for the club's third year.
Founder Jackie Ho has called it a tribute to the grandmother who raised him in Hong Kong. A backstory like that normally makes me wary, because it is usually doing the work the watch cannot. Here it is the other way round.
The table number can be personalised, up to three digits, hand engraved, so a buyer can put a date on it instead. Each watch ships in a bamboo steamer with three bamboo coasters and a warranty card printed like a dim sum order slip.
