Found The Dalai Lama's Patek Philippe, Gifted By FDR Via An OSS
Officer Who Was The Grandson Of Leo Tolstoy (Seriously)
After many years of trying to get a photograph of the Dalai Lama's Patek Philippe watch that
was a gift from President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943, I nearly fell off my
office chair when I got an e-mail this morning from Thomas Laird directing me
to Senator Patrick Leahy's
Facebook page, where Senator Leahy (perhaps better known for his cameos in
Batman movies including The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises,
and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) posted a photograph of the watch
as well as a
photograph of the Dalai Lama showing it to him last
night at an event in Washington, D.C.
The
Journey
The journey to see and identify this watch started back in July
2010, when I first digitally met John Reardon, who is now my boss at Christie's
(that was certainly not anticipated at the time) and who was at that time
working at Betteridge in Greenwich, Connecticut. John was writing an article on
HODINKEE about the Dalai Lama's Patek Philippe, and I noticed it
in the draft section of the site. I did a little digging and developed a more comprehensive
story of how the Dalai Lama received the watch from
the book The
Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama by Thomas Laird.
The
Story
The Patek Philippe was given to the Dalai Lama by President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943. However, it was not personally presented by FDR, but was presented to the
Dalai Lama in Lhasa, Tibet, on behalf of President Roosevelt by two
intelligence agents in the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS for
short (the World War II U.S. intelligence service that was the forerunner to
the Central Intelligence Agency). The two intelligence agents were Ilia Tolstoy (who the
book describes as the "émigré grandson of the Russian novelist") and Brooke
Dolan. Tolstoy and Dolan went to Tibet to examine the possibility of
constructing a road
from India to China that would run
through Tibet in order to help the U.S. better provide China with supplies to
fight and resist the Japanese. They
carried to the Dalai Lama the Patek Philippe and a letter from President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Laird writes, "Tradition dictated
that he say nothing to his visitors and that they say nothing to him.
Instead, he accepted gifts from the foreign envoys and they accepted a ritual
'khata' (a traditional ceremonial scarf) from him in silence."
Page 294 of the book further tells the story directly from the
Dalai Lama:
"This is from Tolstoy and Dolan," he said as he put a
box in my hands.
Inside was a gold
Patek Philippe watch, which showed the phases of the moon and the days of the
week."Well Roosevelt certainly had nice taste," I said. "How
old were you when you received this from President Roosevelt?" I
asked"
"I was seven or eight," he said.
"Has it
been repaired?"
"Several
times, " he said with an embarrassed smile. By the
time his brother left for China, in 1946, accompanying a Tibetan delegation,
who went to offer congratulations to India's colonial government and to China
on their victory in the war, the timepiece already needed repairs. Even a Patek couldn't
hold up to the wear and tear from young Tenzin Gyatso.
"Then after that, on one occasion in Lhasa," the Dalai
Lama said, "I had it stay in my pocket and I also had a strong magnet. I
was working on the movie projector. So the watch went out for repair
again," he noted sheepishly. It was even out for repairs in Switzerland in
1959, when he fled Lhasa the last time. Regular maintenance is the reason he
has the watch today.
He joked about the checkered history of Roosevelt's gift. "It seems that this
watch has made the prayer that it will never be in the hands of the
Chinese!" the Dalai Lama laughed.
Laird had taken a photograph of the watch and it was on a slide
in his collection of over 200,000 slides of photographs he had taken in Tibet,
but he was unfortunately not able to find it.
I later
contacted the Office of Tibet in Washington, DC, requesting a photograph of the
watch. They were kind enough to connect me directly to the Office of
His Holiness the Dalai Lama in India, but I received a succinct e-mail from a
secretary in the office denying
my request. No reason was provided, but perhaps they thought
the Chinese media
would take it out of context to paint the Dalai Lama
as living a lavish lifestyle by owning such an expensive watch. In fact, there
are numerous articles online
discussing the Dalai Lama's watches, which seem to include at least a few Rolex
and Omega watches, and various articles online saying he should sell his watches
and give the money to charities.
and he is quoted about it in his book "Ethics for the New
Millennium Furthermore, the Dalai
Lama is known to have some watchmaking skills, ":
"For example, I have always enjoyed repairing watches. But
I can remember a number of occasions as a boy when, completely losing my
patience with those tiny, intricate parts, I picked up the mechanism and
smashed it down on the table. Of course, later I felt very sorry and ashamed of
my behavior--especially when, as on one occasion, I had to return the watch to
its owner in a condition worse than it was before!"
The
Reference 658
That brings us back to today and the photographs that Senator
Leahy posted last night. After quick review with John Reardon, we identified
the watch as an extremely rare and complicated reference 658, which is a watch
featuring a perpetual calendar with moon phase, split-seconds chronograph, and
minute repeater. It was
a reference launched in 1937 in a modernist-style case and that was in
production until the late 1950s. Only approximately 15 examples of this
reference were produced, according to Eric
Tortella's database. The Dalai Lama's watch
is on the earlier side of production, featuring smaller registers, Arabic
numerals that go from 1-12 with the exception of the 6 (later
versions had larger registers that caused the removal of the 3, 9, and 12
numerals on the dial), and an
earlier and longer signature that says "PATEK, PHILIPPE & Co."
rather than just "PATEK PHILIPPE."
One
interesting detail that caught the attention of John and me at first was what
appeared to be a ridge
carved on the dial in the photograph, which we then identified
as only being on the right half of the dial. However, after a little closer
examination, it seems that it may be a scratch on the inside of the crystal,
perhaps from the hour hand, which may have been bent upwards and scraped along
the underside of the crystal.
One other notable feature of the watch in terms of condition is
that the dial seems to remain
in excellent condition with enamel numbering and lettering that appears to have
never been washed. The case, however, has in my view likely been polished given
how the grain looks on the gold, but that is not at all surprising.
We have
a Patek Philippe archive image of the reference 658 and it has the identical
dial configuration of the Dalai Lama's watch. It seems possible that he has the
exact watch depicted in the archive photograph. Even
the way the Arabic "2" sits on the dial with a small dot above it as
well as what seems to be a rough bottom to the "2" in "12"
seem to be mirrored in the archive photograph and the photograph of the Dalai
Lama's watch. I would want to see a higher-resolution photograph of the Dalai
Lama's watch (or even better, inspect it in person) in order to examine a few
more details, such as the spacing between the periods and the abbreviations for
the days of the week, but I have some confidence the archive image is the Dalai
Lama's watch, based on what I can see.
Its
Value?
So what is the value of this watch? Christie's sold two later
examples of the reference 658 in the last six years. One sold for the
equivalent of $357,909 in Geneva in November 2010, while another sold
for the equivalent of $273,227 in Geneva in November 2011, and again for the
equivalent of $253,605 in November 2013. Sotheby's sold a probably
unique example with black dial from 1937 signed "E. GÜBELIN" (rather
than "PATEK PHILIPPE") for $527,000 in December 2014 in New York.
John Goldberger took a great photo of it here and you can also see it on
the site of Davide Parmegiani.
I would say a conservative auction estimate on this reference
658 would be $150,000
to $250,000 without consideration of the provenance;
however, with this kind of history behind the watch, the sky would truly be
the limit.
Donald
Trump Impression – How funny is that?
Note:
How great is this? Hodinkee.com, the daily watch and timepiece blog,
posted this fascinating history piece last June. It’s
interesting that HHDL, as he’s sometimes styled, travels with this beautiful
Patek Philippe, rather than keeping it in a safe deposit box in Dharamshala, but
not that surprising that the god-king who has become a premium garden gnome for
atheistic and agnostic liberals would choose to display it to Hollywood junk movie extra and sometimes Sen. Patrick Leahy of the opioid-addled state of Vermont. I
wonder whether HHDL had already developed in front of the mirror the ultra-mean "Donald Trump impression" pictured
above, the one he publicly debuted on the Good Morning Britain television program for an appreciative Piers Morgan a little later in US
presidential election season, where he viciously lampooned candidate Donald Trump’s
hairstyle and mouth movements (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct4BOEZz2yg
Message to Tenzin Gyatso: Compassion begins at
home. According to you, constantly, repeatedly, it's supposed to happen all the time and without exception.
What you did was horrible. It beggars belief. To say I’m disappointed in you greatly understates matters. I disbelieve now. So should everybody else. Shame.
Kinks:
Nobody's Fool (Link)
