Reference:1802

The 1802 is the smooth-bezel Day-Date, the plain polished member of the 4-digit President group. Everything behind the bezel is 1803: the same 36mm case, the same caliber 1555 and later 1556, the same quickset-free day-and-date mechanism and the same President bracelet. What changes is the ring around the crystal, which on the 1802 is left smooth and gently domed instead of fluted. Rolex offered it in yellow, white and pink gold and in platinum. It was always the minority choice against the fluted 1803, and two things carry the reference today: the dials, which run from early pie-pan silver through tropical black and lacquered Stella colours, and the Omani commissions, which is where the 1802 reaches serious money.

The 1802 in 18k yellow gold. The smooth, gently domed bezel is the only thing separating it from the fluted 1803.

Core facts

detail	value
reference	1802
family	Day-Date
production	alongside the 1803 from around 1960 to the 1977–78 changeover to the 5-digit references
movement	caliber 1555, then caliber 1556 from around 1965; hacking from 1972; no quickset
case	36mm President in 18k yellow, white or pink gold, or platinum
crystal	acrylic with Cyclops
bezel	smooth, polished and gently domed — no fluting, gem-setting or texture
bracelet	President; Jubilee on documented examples
dial	pie-pan, doorstep, tropical black, Stella lacquer, diamond-set, English / French / Italian / Spanish / Eastern-Arabic calendar discs, Omani Qaboos and Khanjar
crown	Twinlock screw-down
sibling references	1803 (fluted), 1804 (gem-set), 1806 (Florentine), 1807 (bark), 1811 (Morellis)
predecessor	originals-era 6510 / 6511 / 6611 / 6612 cluster
successor	5-digit 18028 (yellow gold), 18029 (white gold), 18026 (platinum), all smooth-bezel

Where it sits in the line

The 4-digit Day-Date splits by bezel, and the last digit of the reference is what carries the distinction. The 1802 takes the smooth bezel, the 1803 the fluting that became the Day-Date's signature, the 1804 a factory diamond set, the 1806 the Florentine cross-hatch, the 1807 bark and the 1811 the Morellis moiré. Read the group that way and the 1802 is the one that does nothing to the gold at all.

That restraint is the whole proposition. A fluted President announces itself from across a room; a smooth-bezel one reads as a plain gold watch until someone looks at the dial. Rolex sold far more fluted examples, so the 1802 is the scarcer watch in production without ever having been rare in the collectible sense, and for decades it traded at a discount to the 1803 for exactly the reason that now makes it interesting. The same logic repeats one generation later on the 18028, the smooth-bezel 5-digit successor.

A note on the number 1800 itself, since it turns up in searches and in older catalogues. Rolex used 1800 as the root of the series rather than as a bezel variant of its own, in the same way that 18000, 18200 and 118000 later stood for whole generations. A small number of watches were catalogued as "ref. 1800" by the auction houses in the early 2000s, among them a 1965 yellow-gold example at Christie's in London in 2004 and a 1973 blue-dial example at Christie's in Hong Kong in 2006. Those attributions have not been repeated since, no editorial source describes a distinct 1800 bezel, and the number does not appear in the marketplace reference indexes that carry 1802, 1803 and 1811. Treat a watch offered as a 1800 as a 180x-series Day-Date whose specific reference needs checking between the lugs.

Production outline

The 1802 runs with the rest of the 4-digit group from around 1960 to the 1977–78 changeover, and it shares the family case-serial stream rather than carrying a sequence of its own. Documented examples span most of that range: case numbers around 497,000 and 1,014,000 on early watches, 1,183,000 and 1,634,000 through the middle 1960s, 2,612,000 by the end of that decade, and 3,781,000 and 3,795,000 on the Omani watches of about 1974, reaching roughly 4,176,000 on late examples. When the 5-digit references took over, the smooth bezel split by metal into the 18028 in yellow gold, the 18029 in white gold and the 18026 in platinum. No Rolex production figure has been published for the 1802, and as with the other non-fluted siblings it sold in modest numbers against the volume 1803.

Movement notes

The 1802 uses the standard 4-digit Day-Date movement. Caliber 1555 from the start, replaced by caliber 1556 around 1965 with the 19,800 vph rate, the additional jewel and the free-sprung Microstella balance. Hacking seconds arrived across the 1500 family in 1972. No 4-digit Day-Date has a quickset, so both day and date advance only by running the hands through midnight, which is the single biggest practical difference between owning one of these and owning a 5-digit President. There is no 1802-specific caliber; the bezel changes the look of the watch, not the mechanism. The Reference:Movements page holds the caliber lineage, and the 1803 entry covers the 1555-to-1556 transition in detail.

Dial map

A 1970 yellow-gold 1802 with a black lacquered Stella dial and French day disc, on its Jubilee reference 6311, shown with the chronometer attestation that came with it.

The plain bezel keeps the eye on the dial, and the 1802's variety lives there. Early examples carry the pie-pan dial, the shallow faceted profile that drops away at the outer track, usually silvered or champagne with applied baton markers. The doorstep dial is the configuration collectors chase hardest among the standard faces, named for the elongated rectangular markers at six and nine that step in from the edge.

Lacquer is the other half of the story. Phillips sold a 1970 yellow-gold example with a black lacquered Stella dial, still accompanied by its punched Attestation de Chronomètre Officiel, and the Stella colours reach the 1802 as they do the other 4-digit references, burgundy and oxblood among the documented examples. Christie's catalogued a platinum 1802 with a turquoise lacquer dial and diamond markers. Age then does its own work: Antiquorum and Phillips both catalogued the same yellow-gold watch with a tropical black "spider" dial, the lacquer crazed into a fine web, and tropical browns turn up across the reference as they do on any black-lacquered Rolex dial of the period. Diamond-set indices appear on gold and platinum examples throughout.

Calendar discs are their own axis, and the 1802 shows the range better than most references in the group. Beyond English, documented examples carry French, Italian, Spanish and Eastern-Arabic day discs, and the Arabic-calendar watches overlap with the Gulf commissions below. The deeper dial taxonomy that spans the whole President line sits on the 1803 entry.

Case, bezel, crystal, and crown

The case is the 36mm gold or platinum Oyster shared across the 4-digit Day-Date, with a Twinlock screw-down crown, a screw-down caseback and an acrylic crystal with Cyclops. The bezel is the reference: a plain polished ring, gently domed, with none of the worked surface of its siblings. On a polished-out case that smoothness can be hard to read, which is part of why the reference gets miscatalogued.

That miscataloguing is worth knowing about, and the caseback is the trap. Phillips catalogued one yellow-gold 1802 as "Ref. 1802, stamped 1803 inside the case back" and, three lots later in the same sale, a platinum one as "Ref. 1802, stamped 1804 in the caseback". Two watches, two different sibling references stamped inside, both genuine 1802s. Antiquorum hedges the same problem from the other direction, listing several watches as "Ref. 1802/1803" rather than committing.

The explanation is mundane. The 4-digit Day-Dates share a case, a caseback and a movement, Rolex stamped casebacks in lots that did not track the bezel fitted, and a replacement bezel is a straightforward service part, so a watch that left Geneva as one reference can be wearing another's bezel decades later. Attribution rests on the number engraved between the lugs, read against the bezel actually fitted. The caseback stamp dates the caseback lot and nothing more.

Bracelets, end links, and clasps

The 1802 wears the President, with end links stamped 53 and the concealed deployant clasp on documented examples. The Jubilee is not a substitution to be suspicious of on this reference: Phillips catalogued a 1970 yellow-gold 1802 on a Rolex Jubilee reference 6311 with end links stamped 53 and a folding deployant clasp stamped 4.69, all of it signed and consistent with the watch. Rolex supplied the Day-Date on the Jubilee from the originals era onward, and the 1802 is one of the references where that fitment is documented rather than assumed.

The usual caution still applies. A clasp date code dates the bracelet rather than the watch head, and decades of service can leave a later bracelet on an earlier case; the 2004 Christie's sale of a 180x-series example carried a saleroom notice flagging exactly that, an unsigned clasp casting doubt on the bracelet as a whole. The cross-family detail sits on Reference:Bracelets.

Special branches

The Omani Day-Dates

The 1975 platinum Khanjar 1802: blue dial, red Khanjar at six, diamond markers, Asprey-signed case. The reference's highest confirmed result.

The Gulf commissions are where the 1802 leaves the ordinary market behind, and the smooth bezel appears to have been the preferred canvas for them. Two emblems recur. The first is the signature of Sultan Qaboos bin Said, applied in green on silvered dials; Christie's catalogued a white-gold example with the Qaboos signature, case number 3,795,515, dated to about 1974, and further Qaboos examples in yellow and pink gold. The second is the red Khanjar, the crossed-daggers emblem of the Sultanate.

The best-documented Khanjar 1802 is the one Phillips sold in 2015: a 1975 platinum example, case number 3,856,081 repeated inside the caseback, with a blue dial carrying the red printed Khanjar at six o'clock and round-cut and baguette diamond markers, on a platinum President. Its case is signed Asprey, which is the hard evidence for how these watches reached Muscat. The London retailer applied the emblems for the Omani court, and the Muscat distributor Khimji Ramdas is the other name that recurs on Gulf Day-Dates of the period. It sold for CHF 131,000, the highest confirmed result for the reference.

The same commissions run across the 1803, the 1804 and the platinum 1831, so an Omani dial is a branch of the whole Day-Date line rather than a quirk of this one reference. What the 1802 contributes is volume: it is among the more frequently documented references in the group for Qaboos and Khanjar dials.

Auction record

The 1802's market is bimodal, and the gap between the two halves is wide. A plain yellow-gold example with a standard dial belongs in the same band as any honest 4-digit President, from under ten thousand dollars to the low teens: Bonhams sold one for USD 8,925 in April 2023, and Antiquorum sold yellow-gold examples for CHF 9,375 in November 2019 and CHF 12,500 in May 2019. Nothing about the smooth bezel commands a premium of its own.

The Omani watches sit in a different market entirely. The platinum diamond-set Khanjar example Phillips sold in 2015 reached CHF 131,000, the reference's high-water mark, and Christie's sold a second platinum Khanjar for CHF 113,400 in 2023. Qaboos-signature examples have carried USD 44,100 in Dubai in 2022 and CHF 43,750 in Geneva in 2021. The pattern is consistent across the group: the case and movement are ordinary, and the dial is the entire proposition.

The Stella dials are the third tier, between the two. Phillips sold a 1970 yellow-gold black-lacquer example on its Jubilee, with the original chronometer attestation, for CHF 43,750 against a CHF 15,000–30,000 estimate — roughly four times what the same watch would bring with a silvered dial.

date	house	configuration	result
May 2015	Phillips Geneva, Glamorous Day-Date, lot 10	platinum, diamond-set, blue dial with red Khanjar, Asprey-signed case, 1975	CHF 131,000
Oct 2023	Christie's Geneva, Passion for Time, lot 2206	platinum, diamond-set, pie-pan dial with red Khanjar	CHF 113,400
Nov 2021	Christie's Hong Kong, An Exceptional Season of Watches, lot 2315	yellow gold, Spanish calendar disc	HKD 125,000
Mar 2022	Christie's Dubai, Watches Online: The Dubai Edit, lot 43	gold, diamond-set, made for Sultan Qaboos	USD 44,100
May 2015	Phillips Geneva, Glamorous Day-Date, lot 7	yellow gold, black lacquered Stella dial, Jubilee, 1970	CHF 43,750
Nov 2021	Christie's Geneva, Rare Watches, lot 38	gold, diamond-set, Arabic calendar disc	CHF 43,750
May 2019	Antiquorum Geneva, lot 323	yellow gold	CHF 12,500
Nov 2019	Antiquorum Geneva, lot 162	yellow gold	CHF 9,375
Apr 2023	Bonhams, lot 59	18k gold, white dial	USD 8,925
Nov 2023	Christie's Geneva, Rare Watches, lot 71	white gold, Qaboos signature in green, case 3,795,515, c.1974	not sold (est. CHF 30,000–50,000)
Oct 2023	Christie's Dubai, lot 26	yellow gold, Qaboos signature	not sold (est. 35,000–55,000)

Phillips ran two further 1802 lots in the same 2015 Glamorous Day-Date sale, in white and yellow gold, and Antiquorum offered two in the 2006 sale of the Mondani collection. Results for those four are not recorded here, and they matter mainly as evidence of how broadly the reference was made across metals.

Related references

Day-Date 1803 — Fluted President (1960–1977) Day-Date 1804 Day-Date 1806 Day-Date 1807 Day-Date 1811 Day-Date 1831 Day-Date 18028 — 1977–1988 smooth-bezel successor Day-Date 6510 — 1956–1957

See also the Day-Date family index, movement reference, bracelet & clasp guide, and serial numbers by year.

Sources

• The Vintage Rolex Field Manual — Colin A. White, Morning Tundra
• Day-Date — The Presidential Rolex — Pucci Papaleo, Pucci Papaleo Editore, 2015
• Rolex Day-Date — Giorgia Mondani and Guido Mondani, Guido Mondani Editore
• Phillips, "Rolex Ref. 1802, stamped 1804 in the caseback, Day-Date — a very rare and important platinum and diamond-set calendar wristwatch made for the Sultanate of Oman and retailed by Asprey, Phillips Geneva, Glamorous Day-Date, lot 10", Phillips, 2015
• Phillips, "Rolex Ref. 1802, stamped 1803 inside the case back, Day-Date — a rare yellow gold calendar wristwatch with black lacquered "Stella" dial and Attestation de Chronometre Officiel, Phillips Geneva, Glamorous Day-Date, lot 7", Phillips, 2015
• Christie's, "Rolex, very rare platinum and diamond-set Day-Date, ref. 1802, with pie-pan dial and red Khanjar symbol — Christie's Geneva, Passion for Time, lot 2206", Christie's, 2023
• Christie's, "Rolex, a very rare 18K white gold Day-Date made for the Sultanate of Oman, ref. 1802 — Christie's Geneva, Rare Watches, lot 71", Christie's, 2023
• Christie's, "Rolex, Day-Date ref. 1802, a rare gold and diamond-set automatic wristwatch made for Sultan Qaboos of Oman — Christie's Dubai, Watches Online: The Dubai Edit, lot 43", Christie's, 2022
• Christie's, "Rolex, a rare 18K gold and diamond-set automatic wristwatch with sweep centre seconds, Arabic calendar and bracelet, ref. 1802 — Christie's Geneva, Rare Watches, lot 38", Christie's, 2021
• Christie's, "Rolex, an 18K gold automatic wristwatch with sweep centre seconds, day, date and bracelet, ref. 1802 — Christie's Hong Kong, An Exceptional Season of Watches, lot 2315", Christie's, 2021
• Antiquorum, "Rolex, ref. 1802, Day-Date, yellow gold — Antiquorum Geneva, Important Modern & Vintage Timepieces, lot 162", Antiquorum, 2019
• Bonhams, "Rolex, an 18K gold automatic calendar bracelet watch, ref. 1802 — Bonhams, lot 59", Bonhams, 2023
• Collector Square, "Rolex Day-Date ref. 1802 — Collector Square LuxPrice-Index auction record", Collector Square
• Vintage Watches Milano, "Early Rolex Day-Date ref. 1802 with Doorstep dial", Vintage Watches Milano
• Sotheby's editorial, "The Rolex Day-Date: A Complete Collector's Guide", Sotheby's
• Monochrome editorial, "In-Depth: The History of the Rolex Day-Date, The Presidential Watch", Monochrome Watches
• Italian Watch Spotter editorial, "The History of the Rolex Day-Date", Italian Watch Spotter
• WatchBase editorial, "Rolex Day-Date History", WatchBase, 2015-02-21
• Ottuhr editorial, "Rolex Day-Date 1803 Reference Report", Ottuhr