World leaders attending a summit in Phnom Penh will receive Cambodia-made watches from host Hun Sen, a well-known fan of luxury watches.

The gift to VIPs at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) gatherings and the East Asia Summit has raised eyebrows in a country with no watchmaking history.

US President Joe Biden and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang are among the guests at the three-day meeting, which will focus on the Myanmar crisis and other regional issues.

The 25 tourbillon watches will be presented to delegates, said Hun Sen, who plans to wear one himself throughout the summit and at the upcoming G20 and APEC meetings.

The watches have matte gray dials marked “ASEAN Cambodia 2022” in a silver-tone case marked “Made in Cambodia,” as seen in pictures on Hun Sen’s official Facebook page.

Hun Sen – who has ruled the kingdom for 37 years and is Asia’s longest-serving leader – said the new watches “demonstrate Cambodia’s advancement in science and technology”.

The strongman ruler has been pictured with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Swiss luxury watches in recent years.

Cambodian company Prince Horology – which was tasked with designing and assembling the pieces – dismissed suggestions that the items were overly luxurious, stressing that the dials were stainless steel.

Tourbillon watches are so called because of their complicated internal mechanism when viewed from the outside and were patented around 200 years ago by a Swiss-French watchmaker.

While modern watchmaking has rendered such designs obsolete, tourbillons are highly coveted to watch collectors with limited editions changing hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“They’re obviously highly decorated, highly polished,” Gabriel Tan, spokesman for Prince Horology, told AFP.

The watches also feature “synthetic rubies,” he said, which “are used to facilitate watch movement.”

All 25 were designed and assembled in Cambodia over the past 18 months, Tan said, declining to comment on their cost.

But in a country with a rich cultural and artistic history, some questioned the gift.

“We are not Switzerland,” said Cambodian rights activist Ou Virak, founder and president of the pro-democracy group Future Forum.

“It looks distressed, at least from the outside when you look inside,” he told AFP, adding that the gesture is unlikely to be viewed “positively”.

“You really have to wonder who makes the watch,” he said.

“I just hope it’s not another Chinese company with a Cambodian stamp.”

Prince Horology is part of the Prince Group of Companies and is headed by Chen Zhi, a Chinese national who was granted Cambodian citizenship in 2014, according to Radio Free Asia.

The group is one of the UK’s largest conglomerates and is active in banking, tourism, food and real estate.