In a quiet corner of Beijing, a watch smith works quietly at restoring life to intricate works of art, accompanied by nothing but his skill and memories. Zhao Xu breaks the reverie to get his story.

For Wang Jin, the best music in the world comes from a tiny little box, and it must be accompanied by the life-affirming tick-tock of mechanical clockwork.

After spending more than three decades restoring antique clocks to their former glory, Wang has become accustomed to an undisturbed life that is as calm as a mirrored pond in a relatively reclusive corner in Beijing's Forbidden City.

But that is what's on the surface.

Underneath, an accumulation of the concentrated quietness of days and months can lead to a sudden breakthrough, heralded by a chime that seems to rise from the bejeweled gilt chamber of an antique clock to the gray-tiled roofs of the ancient palace.

That's when the thin, slightly pallid man finally sits back, a slight flush on a face worn by fatigue. He can finally lose himself once again in the musical tick-tock of a clock, revived.

"I've never thought about leaving here, not once," Wang says. "This place is where I've spent most of my adult life and it is really all I know."

Outside his little palace-annex-turned workshop, Wang is a taciturn, socially tactless man. At work, surrounded by his gorgeous restorations, he is the absolute monarch, emperor of all he surveys.

Among his most beloved is a sumptuously decorated gilt bronze clock, made in Britain around the mid-18th century. Every one of its three tiers showcases individual wonders.

Wound up, the double doors on the bottom tier slowly swing open to reveal a glistening waterfall, as beautiful tunes play.

The middle tier hints at a more decadent past, with tiny compartments holding everything that might be found in an aristocratic young lady's boudoir: a tiny bottle of perfume, little brushes for applying rouge to dainty cheeks, and even miniature opera glasses for that visit to the theater where both actors on stage and handsome young men in the stalls can be scrutinized.

The top tier is the heart of the timepiece, although it is the least fanciful, and is a clear nod to the owner - the Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty who reigned between 1736 and 1796. Its whole design is based on a pagoda, complete with a soaring, swirling dragon rendered in abstract form.

As Wang ponders the immense effort that had gone into the mechanics and aesthetics of such a clockwork marvel, he says that the clock collections in the Forbidden City were more about satisfying imagination than measuring time.

"They were the playthings of the emperors and their courtesans," Wang says. "A large part of my job is focused on recreating the wow effect they once had on the beholders."

If polishing off the tarnish of time passed requires hard physical labor, then to solve all the engineering mysteries is sheer mental exercise.

"The Forbidden City holds the world's largest and most extravagant collection of antique clocks manufactured in Europe between the early 18th and 19th centuries. The fact that they were custom-made for the Chinese emperors meant that there is little or no information left in their countries of origin," Wang says.

Very often, the back panel of the clock would open to reveal a bewildering mass of tiny metal chains and wheels, the secret parts responsible for all the tricks.

It is a daunting sight for anyone, especially so for a 16-year-old Wang, first led through the door of the imperial palace by his grandfather, a keeper of the imperial library before his retirement in the 1970s.

"I took a glance and said to myself: Where should I start?" Wang is more inclined to smile away the previous 35 years than to dwell on the complexities of his apprenticeship.

"Restoring an antique clock is like feeling your way inside a dark underground maze. You let your knowledge and instinct lead the way," he says. "Sometimes, you hit a dead end and are forced to turn back. After you've tried and failed enough times, a faint glimmer of light would mysteriously appear ahead. You lock onto it, follow its lead, and go on until very suddenly, you find yourself bathed in bright sunlight."

Wang estimates that he has repaired and restored nearly 250 works, one sixth of the Forbidden City's total clock collection.

"When I'm working, I'm unconscious of time," he says, although he is very much aware of his place in history, a history that can be traced back more than 300 years.

"What separates the Forbidden City clocks from other imperial antiques is their East-meet-West nature."

Most experts agree that modern mechanical clocks were first introduced into China by Western missionaries around the early 17th century. During the reign of the Emperor Kangxi (1654-1722), they became so popular with the ruling elite that a special department within the Forbidden City workshops was established to assemble and repair the imported clocks, and to build new ones in a more expressly Chinese style.

Both foreign missionaries and their locally trained watch smiths were employed here.

As times changed, the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 meant that treasures in the Forbidden City were either removed or left unattended. Some eventually ended up in Taiwan province with the exodus of the Kuomintang.

But the clocks stayed, and Wang guesses that it was their sheer weight and size that saved them from pilferage.

The knowledge and expertise also survived and continues. Wang was a disciple of a late master, and he, too, has taken an apprentice under his wings about seven years ago - a young graduate from Beijing's North China University of Technology.

"It's all about patience, and my teacher has plenty of that," says 30-year-old Qi Haonan.

Inside the Forbidden City, Wang's studio is only a few steps away from the parts of the Palace that are open to visitors and every morning, he has to cut through endless streams of visitors to get to his workshop.

Here, in his quiet corner, the solitude is punctuated only by the raven's cries overhead and the rhythmic tick-tock of the clocks. Occasionally, he may be distracted by a wandering toddler costumed in pigtails and imperial robes, or bemused by a flag-waving, fast-talking tour guide.

But it is a momentary diversion, and before long, he is immersed once again in an ordered world where every part and every gear contribute to perfect precision.

Contact the writer at zhaoxu@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 01/08/2013 page18)