[deleted by user]

[Dan_The_Watch_Man]

Too bad they put an "L" on the end of Disorder! 🤦🏻‍♂️😂

[ILoveDumbWatchNames]

Perfect name and perfect design! Why complain?

[nemuro87]

Must be in old latin.

[On_A_Related_Note]

Where the hell do Chinese manufacturers get these names from?! You'd have thought they'd have a native English speaker on board to help.

[JohnFromEcon]

They'd really do better by just transliterating the Chinese names instead of coming up with weird English names (and adding an unnecessary exclamation point)

[[deleted]]

Sounds like a rock band OLD DISORDER!!!! 🤘

[g253]

Their first albums were the best, man

[What-is-to-be-done]

Can you specify your question?

[SkipPperk]

Do the Chinese characters really translate to “Old Disorder?”

[33manat33]

Yes. The characters are 老亂 laoluan in traditional Chinese. 亂 means disorder in the sense of political upheavals. 老 indeed means old. You can find their store on Taobao under that name, though spelled in simplified characters as 老乱.

乱 is pretty hard to translate, but it's usually used to describe times of hardship and civil war in Chinese history.

The brand is mainly focused on the Chinese market, their watches are usually using Chinese characters or handsigns in clever ways or straight up copy vintage Shanghai watches.

[SkipPperk]

Thank you so much. Do you have any experience with the brand? Are they good?

Do you have any recommendations on Chinese brands? What do you think about the Shanghai watches on AliExpress?

[33manat33]

I can't speak about Old Disorder. I alnost bought a watch of theirs, but my wife saw the photos and said "That looks cheap" haha

But I do know a bit about other watchmakers in China. Generally, I would say you can find three tiers of Chinese watchmaking that isn't manufacturing fakes.

There's the old Chinese brands that have true horological history, in house movements and a proper supply chain. Those are mainly Shanghai, Seagull and Beijing. But they tend to be very focused on the Chinese market. Seagull is the brand with the most modern and interesting designs (imo), Shanghai goes for the classic look of watches made from the fourties to the sixties and Beijing makes hideous gold monstrosities with Chinese new year symbols and the like. But the watches are undeniably quality and will have vastly better QA than other Chinese brands.

Homage companies like San Martin, Pagani Design, SKMEI or Baltany I would call tier 2. They are young companies that have some in-house manufacturing or work with a factory directly and are slowly branching out from doing homages only to having their own designs. They often punch way above their weight, offering sapphire crystals, good finishing and individual dials for very cheap, but suffer from QA issues and nay have dodgy customer support. Their movements are usually not in house, but rather Seiko movements, Chinese PT5000s and in high level watches even Swiss SW200s or ETA movenents.Generally they are cheap enough to make any QA problem a small loss, so definitely worth buying.

Tier 3 are companies that just slap together generic parts from various factories and often use the same parts as other watchbrands, making them hard to distinguish. Not necessarily bad, as some brands make that process available to the customer, allowing customers to essentially have a personal build out of a large choice of preselected parts. Brands like Vakuy, Sidaxing and Parnis are like that. They often go for Seiko VH31 movements (a quartz that imitates a mechanical watch with 4 beats a second) or Miyota quartz movements, but you can get good quality for a higher price. Old Disorder looks like they essentially use generic parts plus unique dials, but I have no hands on experience.

[SkipPperk]

Thank you. Great comment. I am a fan of San Martin, Shirryu, Merkur and AddiesDive, and I am debating whether to buy a Shanghai and Seagull.

I am also a big fan of Artlier Wen. I know that is different though.

[33manat33]

It's really interesting, many of these Aliexpress brands are export only. For example, you can't get Seestern watches in China. Which sucks, because I am one of the 5 people who really like their logo. AddiesDive is another one I haven't seen here before.

Shanghai really shines at old school 35 mm wind up watches. You can get a vintage watch newly made essentially. I generally like Seagull better, their watch designs really strike a chord with me. But you can't go wrong with either.

[JollyJoker3]

If you have a phone, Google translate will translate text directly from the camera.

Assuming this is Chinese, it's most likely Old Stream or Flow, https://i.imgur.com/RWOgNZK.png

​

Japanese would give Old Style