Five years in development, a historic Chinese name returns with a trio of chiming complications.

If you were planning to revive a sleeping watchmaking brand from the late 19th century, where would you start? Most rational folks would probably source a batch of reliable off-the-shelf Swiss or Japanese automatic movements, drop them into a neatly polished case, and spend the rest of the quarter on marketing. But Lin Xiaolin isn’t most folks, and Atelier Mephalie certainly isn’t taking the easy way out.

Founded in 1876 by Sun Tingyuan and awarded a gold medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the Mephalie name lay dormant for decades after the tragic destruction of its factory in 1932. Lin, a 15-year manufacturing veteran, decided that if Mephalie was coming back, it needed to make an indelible statement right out of the gate.…