Rolex Celebrates 100 Years of the Oyster With a Landmark Shanghai Exhibition

We had an amazing walk through 100 years of horological history in Shanghai, where Rolex presented The Oyster Story. Its tale is hugely all-encompassing and quite stunning.

The Oyster Story is a celebration of the anniversary of the invention that pushed Rolex—and indeed the watchmaking universe—forward. You walk into the West Bund Dome and suddenly you’re surrounded.

Wonderfully curated images and videos unfold around the interior of the dome in a continuous horizontal band, and you’re seeing landmark inventions, timepieces, and events. You’ll be transported from the top of a Swiss alp to the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans, from aboard a racing yacht to the world of classical music, all connected to the people and causes the Rolex Foundation helps support and sustain.

You could simply stand there and watch everything happen around you.

Within the huge dome is the Oyster Pavilion, which is what greets you upon entering. It’s a two-floor exhibit that walks visitors through the history of Rolex, the history of the Oyster, and the history of the people who changed the world with it.

On the watch-geek side, you’ll see pieces that are rarely available to the public outside the collections of very serious enthusiasts. Upstairs is an array of Rolex Testimonees and friends of the brand, and there’s a balcony overlooking the entire exhibition. From there, you can choose whether to go left or right—or into the cinema beside you.

If you leave the Oyster Pavilion and head left, you’ll arrive at the Superlative Pavilion. Here, visitors are guided through the technologies that come together to create modern Rolex watches. The journey begins with blocks of the brand’s proprietary alloys and continues all the way to finished cases, bezels, and bracelets.

You’ll see how dials are created using everything from precious metals to natural stone, including the special designs behind the Puzzle, Celebration, and Jubilee dials. Visitors are also given a detailed look at the extensive testing required for a watch to meet Rolex’s demanding standards.

At the center of the pavilion is a video presentation of another special timepiece housed at Rolex headquarters in Geneva: the brand’s atomic clock. Because, of course, Rolex has its own atomic clock.

Walking out of the Superlative Pavilion, you’ll arrive at the Library Lounge, which is, for a watch collector, an extraordinary treasure trove of books about the brand, its watches, and all things Rolex.

The cinema, nestled between the two pavilions, offers a beautifully produced film explaining how Hans Wilsdorf created Rolex and how the company went on to change the world.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the exhibition is that Rolex has assembled so many objects and stories in one place—things that the public rarely has the opportunity to see together. Rolex does not operate a public museum, so exhibitions like this are among the few occasions when visitors can experience the full breadth of the brand’s history.

It was also interesting to hear people remark on how elegant, relatively small, and classic the original watches were. The original Oyster and Oyster Perpetual, for example, look remarkably refined by today’s standards.

The toughest watches in the world were not, at the time, large sports watches. Those didn’t even exist yet.

The watches that changed the world were what we would now consider elegant everyday pieces. And it is that technology—from the original Oyster and Oyster Perpetual—that is being celebrated by this wonderfully educational exhibit.

The Oyster Story is on view at the West Bund Dome in Shanghai until June 28, 2026, and it is worthy of a trip all its own.