Zhu Yanmanzi wears a Hamilton Jazzmaster

In a United Earth Government session in The Wandering Earth 2, Zhu Yanmanzi sits at the desk marked CHINA with her hands folded, a small steel watch with a pale dial at her wrist. She plays Hao Xiaoxi, the young aide and protégé to Zhou Zhezhi, China's representative to the UEG, played by Li Xuejian. The 2023 film is the prequel to China's earlier science-fiction blockbuster, set in the decades when the Sun begins to swell and the government commits the planet to ten thousand engines built to push Earth out of the solar system.

Hamilton was the film's exclusive watch partner and sent dozens of pieces over for the cast, so the round steel Hamilton on Hao Xiaoxi's wrist came out of that arrangement. Its exact model was never recorded, and the dial does not give it up on screen. It reads as a Jazzmaster, Hamilton's dress line: a polished round case and a pale dial on a steel bracelet, the watch a delegation aide wears with a dark suit.

The brand did more than lend watches. Frant Gwo, who directed the film and is himself a Hamilton ambassador, had the company build a one-off prop around the old Chinese idea of a round sky embracing a square earth, a regulator dial set inside a clear square case. By Hamilton's account that prop appears in the film, and it became the Jazzmaster Regulator Automatic limited edition, 122 pieces per dial color to mark the January 22 release, sold only in mainland China. The showpiece is the square one. The watch at the China desk is a plain round Hamilton whose model nobody wrote down.