Oei Hui-lan

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In this Chinese name, the family name is Oei.
Oei Hui-lan
Oei Hui-lan in 1922, with her son Yu-chang Wellington Koo Jr., photographed by Henry Walter Barnett
First Lady of the Republic of China
In role
1 October 1926 – 16 June 1927
PresidentWellington Koo
Personal details
Born21 December 1889
Semarang, Central Java, Dutch East Indies
Died1992 (aged 102–103)
New York City, US
Citizenship
Political partyKuomintang
Spouse(s)Forde Beauchamp Stoker (m. 1909, div. 1920)
​
​
(m. 1920; div. 1958)​
Children3
Parent(s)
Hanyu Pinyin
Huáng Huìlán
Wade–GilesHuang2 Hui4-lan2
Southern Min
Hokkien POJÛiⁿ Hūi-lân

Oei Hui-lan (

Chinese-Indonesian international socialite and style icon, and, from late 1926 until 1927, the First Lady of the Republic of China.[1][2][3][4] She was married firstly to British consular agent Beauchamp Caulfield-Stoker, then to the pre-communist Chinese statesman Wellington Koo, and was a daughter and heiress of the colonial Indonesian tycoon Oei Tiong Ham, Majoor der Chinezen.[5]

Both the parents of Oei Hui-lan hailed from the establishment: her father stemmed from one of the wealthiest families in Java, while her mother came from the 'Cabang Atas' aristocracy as a descendant of a Luitenant der Chinezen in Semarang's 18th-century Dutch bureaucracy. After an unsuccessful marriage with Caulfield-Stoker, she met Wellington Koo while in Paris in 1920. They married in Brussels the following year and first lived in Geneva in connection with the establishment of the League of Nations. In 1923, she moved with her husband to Beijing where he served as Acting Premier in the evolving republican Chinese state. During his second term (October 1926—June 1927), Wellington Koo also acted as President of the Republic of China for a brief period, making Oei Hui-lan the First Lady of China. The couple then spent time in Shanghai, Paris and London where Oei Hui-lan became a celebrated hostess. In 1941, she moved to New York where she died in 1992.

Oei Hui-lan, or Madame Koo as she became known, is also remembered for writing two autobiographies and for her contributions to fashion, especially her adaptations of traditional Chinese dress.

Biography

Early life

Colonial Semarang, where Madame Wellington Koo grew up

Oei Hui-lan was born on 21 December 1889 into a leading

Kian Gwan, a trading company founded by her grandfather Oei Tjie Sien in 1863 that became the largest conglomerate in Southeast Asia at the start of the twentieth century.[5]

Her mother,

nouveau riche Oei family – came from the Cabang Atas, the traditional Chinese establishment of colonial Indonesia.[7][8][9] Through her mother, Hui-lan was descended from the merchant-mandarin Goei Poen Kong (1765–1806),[10] who served as estate master or Boedelmeester,[11] then Luitenant der Chinezen in Semarang in the late eighteenth century.[12][13] The Chinese officership, consisting of the ranks of Majoor, Kapitein and Luitenant der Chinezen, was a civil government position in the Dutch colonial bureaucracy of Indonesia.[14] Oei's maternal Goei family traces its roots and prominence in Semarang back to the 1770s. Goei Bing-nio's family had initially resisted Oei Tiong Ham's social and economic rise.[7]

Hui-lan, who used the name Angèle in her youth, had an elder sister,

concubines, as well as some 42 acknowledged children, including her half-brother Oei Tjong Hauw.[5]

The two Oei sisters – as daughters of Oei's senior wife – lived with their father and were educated at home by a string of European tutors and governesses in Semarang, receiving a thoroughly modern upbringing by the standards of the times.

Mandarin and Dutch.[5][17][18]

In 1905, Hui-lan and her sister were part of a recital in Singapore, where they were studying music. It was publicized in a local newspaper, as was a recital she gave in Semarang:[15]

"The three cornered novelty of a young Chinese girl singing in French to an English audience in a Malay country next occupied the attention of the audience. This was “Farfalla” by Ms Angela [sic] H. Oei. Her effort captivated the audience, and but for the fact that encores were not allowed she would most certainly have been recalled. We have attended recitals great and strange in three capitals of Europe, but we must admit that this, the song of Miss Angela Oei staggered us. We repeat the novelty in a nutshell: a Chinese girl from Sumatra [sic!] singing a French classic in French to an English audience. Surely this is a world’s record! Is the East, after all, so far apart from the West?

"In March 1907 Angèle gave a vocal recital in Semarang, a soirée musicale, in the THHK school building in a fund-raiser for the school. She was accompanied by her sixteen-year-old niece, Lim Tshoen, from Singapore and her twelve-year-old nephew, Arthur Lim, on piano. Angèle performed pieces by French composers: Charles Gounod (”Siebel” in Faust) and Georges Bizet (from the opera Carmen) in elegant, fluent French.".

The progressive outlook and attainments of the Oei sisters received the admiration of

royal courts.[1][2]

Marriage to Beauchamp Caulfield-Stoker (1909–1920)

In 1909, in Semarang, Indonesia,

Mayfair, London.[25] This period of her life—when she was known in the society pages as Countess Hoey [an Anglicization of Oei] Stoker[26][27][28] (presumably because her father had been called a count by some) and preferred to be called Lady Stoker[29]
—she omitted from her memoirs.

Oei Hui-lan, then Mrs Beauchamp Caulfield-Stoker, aka Countess Hoey Stoker, and her eldest son, Lionel Montgomery Caulfield-Stoker, in 1920

It had not been an easy marriage, with published reports indicating that Hui-lan's personality, pretensions, and social ambitions had driven her husband to distraction, to the point that by World War I they had become incompatible.

Lady Diana Manners, the Duchess of Sutherland and Margot Asquith.[32] Hui-lan reveled in the dancing and fashion opportunities provided by London high society.[17][18][33] She also reveled in avant-garde fashion:[33][34] "I was allowed to wear my favorite dinner dress, an amazing creation with full Turkish trousers made of green chiffon, a gold lame bodice and a brief yellow jacket. I tucked gold and green flowers in my hair and wore a triple strand of pearls".[35] It was, she later remarked, "the brink of the flapper era and I fitted in like a charm. I had the figure for it, tiny and small bosomed, and the vitality. If you can imagine a Chinese flapper, it was I."[35]

In 1915, Stoker took a commission in the Royal Army Service Corps and endeavored to keep Hui-lan at a distance, retreating to a separate bedroom when at home and rebuffing her desire to join him in Devonport, where he was posted: "It is quite ridiculous for you to come down here as you could not stick it for more than two or three days. In fact, if you came I should have to apply for leave as I could not possibly stop here".[30] Their "lives and ideas were so far apart that it makes it impossible for [me to return home]". Hui-lan filed for divorce in 1919, claiming that her husband had refused to introduce her to his family[30] and on grounds of cruelty and misconduct.[24][30] The Birmingham Daily Gazette noted that the couple's marital travails bore a resemblance to the plot of Joseph Hergesheimer's "striking novel" Java Head, a 1918 best-seller, in which, the paper stated, "the theme of which was the bringing home by an American of a Chinese wife of noble family, and their gradual alienation because of the lack of communion between the two".[36]

Marriage to Wellington Koo (1920–1958)

From left: Wang Chonghui, Oei Hui-lan and her husband Wellington Koo, between 1921 and 1924.

Hui-lan's mother encouraged her daughter, now divorced, to make the acquaintance of the promising,

V. K. Wellington Koo, himself a divorcé and a recent widower with two small children.[3][4][5][37] Through machinations by Hui-lan's mother and sister and others—the parents of Koo's late wife, May Tang, among them—the heiress and the politician met in Paris at a dinner party in August 1920.[38] They announced their engagement on 10 October, during a ball in honor of the anniversary of the Chinese Republic, and were married at the Chinese Legation in Brussels, Belgium, on 9 November.[1][39] The bride wore an antique veil and an ivory gown by Callot Soeurs.[18][33] Later that year, for a State Ball at Buckingham Palace, the new Madame Wellington Koo wore a dress by Charles Frederick Worth and a Cartier diamond tiara.[18][33]

V. K. Wellington Koo
in court uniform

The couple began their married life in Geneva, where Koo had been involved in the formation of the League of Nations.[3][4][37] Hui-lan followed her husband in 1923 to Beijing, where she supported him in his role as Foreign Minister and Finance Minister of the Republic of China.[3][4][5][34] Her father, Majoor Oei Tiong Ham, acquired in 1923 a Ming palace compound for the Koos, in his daughter's name, that had been constructed in the 17th century for the courtesan Chen Yuanyuan, mistress of General Wu Sangui.[34][40][41] In 1924, Madame Koo returned to her native Semarang for the funeral of her father, who had recently died in Singapore; she acted as mourner-in-chief, representing her absent mother as senior wife.[1][2] In 1925, the Koos hosted the Chinese elder statesman Sun Yat-sen and his wife, Soong Ching-ling, for a long stay at their Beijing residence, where Sun later died.[34][41]

During Hui-lan's time in China, the country was undergoing a very turbulent period in its political history – the so-called warlord era, in which different military and political factions sought supremacy in the new, republican Chinese state.[42] Wellington Koo served twice as Acting Premier, first in 1924, then again from 1 October 1926 until 16 June 1927.[3][4][37] During his second term, Koo also acted as President of the Republic of China, which made Hui-lan – for a very brief period – First Lady of China.[3][4][37]

With Koo out of office in 1927, the couple settled down in

Wallis Warfield Simpson, later Duchess of Windsor.[17][43] Hui-lan recalls in her memoirs that Wallis's only phrase in Mandarin was "boy, pass me the champagne".[2][17]

Hui-lan, however, found Shanghai in the 1920s wanting,[34] and thought it "filled with...British shipping people...nobodies at home...[who] put on upper-class airs in China...they were so insular, so middle-class...and looked down their noses at everything really beautiful and indigenous to...[Chinese] culture: jade, porcelain, antiques. And the poor foolish Shanghai Chinese were so impressed with these upstarts that they copied their manners and filled their houses with 'Western' furniture (the so-called smart Shanghai furniture all came from Grand Rapids and was heavy and ugly)."[25] In contrast, she was enamoured of pre-communist Beijing, whose classical order and ancient beauty she thought was comparable only to Paris.[34] In later life, she exclaimed: "Peking is my city, where I once belonged and where I hope someday, if things ever change in my lifetime, to return."[25]

Ambassadress and World War II

The Koos subsequently relocated to Paris in 1932, where Wellington Koo had been appointed Chinese Ambassador to France, a post he kept until 1940.

Second World War, Koo served as Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom in London until 1946.[3][4][37] Koo represented the Republic of China in 1945 as one of the founding members of the United Nations.[3][4][37]

All through this time, Madame Wellington Koo was a celebrated society hostess in Paris and London.

Versailles with a guest list that included Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli; some considered it Europe's last swan song before the Second World War.[18]

She also oversaw the education of her two sons by Koo, Yu-chang Wellington Koo Jr. (1922–1975) and Fu-chang Freeman Koo (1923–1977), who attended MacJannet School in Paris, where they were contemporaries of

Queen Elizabeth II.[44] Her eldest son, Lionel Caulfield-Stoker, lived in England with his father and stepmother, Nora.[citation needed
]

Later life

In 1941, Oei moved to New York City, where her sons Wellington Koo Jr. and Freeman Koo were educated at their father's alma mater, Columbia University.[5][45] Her aim was to use her international connections to persuade the United States to join the war on the Allied side to help China's war effort in Asia.[17] Although the Koos were later reunited in New York, the war years and separation had taken their toll; and the couple divorced in 1958.[5][17] She spent the remainder of her life in New York City.[5][17]

She authored two autobiographies in collaboration, first in 1943 with the society columnist for The Washington Post Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer, then in 1975 with the journalist Isabella Taves.[5][17][18] In the 1980s, she was involved in a series of unsuccessful business ventures in her native Indonesia, including shipping, tobacco and bicycles.[41]

By the time she died in 1992, she had survived her former husband and both their sons.

Chinese mainland to the Communist Party.[4][5]

Style, art and legacy

Madame Koo was much admired for her adaptations of traditional Chinese dress, which she wore with lace trousers and jade necklaces.[17][34][47] She is widely acknowledged for reinventing the Chinese cheongsam in a way that accentuates and flatters the female figure.[34][47] Cheongsam dresses at the time were decorously slit a few inches up the sides, but Hui-lan slashed hers to the knee – in the heady 1920s – "with lace pantelettes just visible to the ankle".[17][47] She thereby helped modernize, glamorize and popularize what soon became the Chinese female national dress.[17][47] Unlike other Asian socialites, Madame Wellington Koo insisted on using local silks and materials, which she thought were of superior quality.[17]

She was featured several times by Vogue Magazine on its list of best-dressed women in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.[17][47][48] Vogue saluted Madame Koo in 1942 as "a Chinese citizen of the world, an international beauty", for her enlightened approach to promoting goodwill between East and West.[49]

An astute and avant-garde art connoisseur, Madame Wellington Koo sat for portraits by Federico Beltrán Masses, Edmund Dulac, Leon Underwood Olive Snell, Olive Pell, and Charles Tharp, and had her photographs taken by the fashion and society photographers Henry Walter Barnett, E. O. Hoppé, Horst P. Horst, Bassano, and George Hoyningen-Huene.[17][18][48][49][50][51]

Her portraits, photographs and dresses are today part of the collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Peranakan Museum in Singapore.[49][52]

In contemporary culture

Madame Koo's fashion legacy continues to attract attention internationally. She was featured as a "woman of style" at China: Through the Looking Glass, an art exhibition curated by Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda, and held to great acclaim in 2015 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[53] In 2018, the Indonesian designer Toton Januar created a video campaign for his Fall Winter collection, based on a reimagining of one of Madame Koo's portraits.[54]

In her native Indonesia, Madame Koo has been the subject of a string of recent publications. Under the pen name Agnes Davonar, popular writers Agnes Li and Teddy Li authored a sentimental and sensationalist biography of Madame Koo, Kisah tragis Oei Hui Lan, putri orang terkaya di Indonesia (The Tragic Story of Oei Hui Lan, Daughter of Indonesia's Richest Man), published in 2009 by AD Publisher.[55] Oei Hui Lan: anak orang terkaya dari Semarang (Oei Hui lan: Daughter of Semarang's Richest Man), another popular biography, was published by Eidelweis Mahameru in 2011.[56] That same year, Mahameru published a popular biography of Madame Koo's father, Oei Tiong Ham: Raja Gula, Orang Terkaya dari Semarang (Oei Tiong Ham: Sugar King, Semarang's Richest Man).[57]

Ancestry

[13]

List of works

  • Hui-lan Koo (Madame Wellington Koo): An Autobiography as Told to Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer New York: Dial Press (1943)[1]
  • No Feast Lasts Forever New York: Times Books (1975)[2]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Koo (née Oei), Hui-lan; Van Rensselaer Thayer, Mary (1943). Hui-lan Koo (Madame Wellington Koo): An Autobiography as Told to Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer. New York: Dial Press. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  2. ^
    ISBN 9780812905731
    .
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i "V.K. Wellington Koo". Columbia University. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j "V. K. Wellington Koo (Gu Weijun)". Australian Centre on China in the World. Archived from the original on 28 September 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  5. ^
    ISBN 9789814620505
    .
  6. ^ "Oei Tiong Ham". National Library Board. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  7. ^
    JSTOR 3351253
    .
  8. ISBN 9789793019116
    .
  9. ISBN 9789814383448
    . Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  10. hdl:20.500.11755/310b5f38-3ee5-49d0-af87-7b5987e9eedf
    .
  11. ^ Medhurst, Walter Henry (1845). A Glance at the Interior of China: Obtained During a Journey Through the Silk and Green Tea Districts Taken in 1845. Printed at the Mission Press. pp. 1–.
  12. ISBN 9789799695215
    . Retrieved 19 April 2018.
  13. ^
    ISBN 9789090302492
    . Retrieved 19 April 2018.
  14. ISBN 9004131574
    . Retrieved 28 September 2018.
  15. ^
    doi:10.17510/wacana.v18i2.591
    .
  16. ISBN 9789810548605
    .
  17. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r "Madame Wellington-Koo – Voted best dressed Chinese Woman of 1920s by Vogue". Nee Hao Magazine. 28 January 2016. Archived from the original on 22 July 2017. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  18. ^ a b c d e f g h i Aubry, Alex (30 January 2016). "Transcontinental Chic: The Extraordinary Life of Madame Wellington Koo". dnachic.com. DNA. Archived from the original on 12 June 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  19. ^ R. A. Kartini (1923). Door duisternis tot licht. Gedachten over en voor het Javaansche volk ... Bijeengegaard en uitgegeven door Mr. J.H. Abendanon. Vierde druk. Electr. Drukkerij "Luctor et Emergo". Retrieved 28 September 2018.
  20. ^ The Straits Times 10 November 1909
  21. ^ "Captain Beauchamp Forde Gordon CAULFIELD-STOKER. Royal Army Service Corps". UK National Archives. UK National Archives. Retrieved 13 January 2019.
  22. ^ a b "A Boycotted Wife: Chinese Lady Obtains Service in England, Married to Englishman in Java", Malaya Tribune', 24 May 1920, page 8
  23. ^ Chamion Caballero and Peter J. Aspinall, Mixed Race in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Springer, 2018), page 164–165
  24. ^ a b The Washington Post, 16 May 1920, page 1
  25. ^ a b c Koo & Taves, 1975.
  26. ^ "From the Far East", Tatler, 24 March 1920, page 19
  27. ^ "The Beautiful Daughter of the Rockefeller of Japan", Tatler, 28 August 1918, page 19
  28. ^ "A Chic and Charming Chinese Lady", Tatler, 28 May 1924, page 25
  29. ^ The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 4 October 1919, Page 12
  30. ^ a b c d "A Boycotted Wife: Chinese Lady Obtains Service in England, Married to Englishman in Java", Malaya Tribune, 24 May 1920, page 8
  31. ^ The Sketch: A Journal of Art and Actuality. London: Ingram brothers. 1919. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  32. ISBN 9780773529991
    . Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  33. ^ a b c d "Soong Mei-Ling, Oei Hui-Lan. Once upon a time". Vogue Italia (in Italian). Vogue Italia. Retrieved 1 November 2018.
  34. ^
    ISBN 9780231512732
    . Retrieved 28 September 2018.
  35. ^ a b Koo & Taves, 1975
  36. ^ "The Chinese Wife", Birmingham Daily Gazette, 22 April 1920, page 4
  37. ^
    ISBN 9780813157566
    . Retrieved 28 September 2018.
  38. ^ Jonathan Clements, Wellington Koo: China
  39. ^ "Wellington Koo '09 Married", Columbia Alumni News, 19 November 1920, page 103
  40. ^ Susanna Hoe, Chinese Footprints: Exploring Women's History in China, Hong Kong and Macau (Roundhouse Publications (Asia) Limited, 1996), page 86
  41. ^
    ISBN 9789799101259
    . Retrieved 28 September 2018.
  42. ISBN 9780774819923
    . Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  43. ^ "Jadeite As Status Symbol". Sotheby's. Archived from the original on 4 March 2021. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
  44. ^ "MacJannet Foundation | Building a Community of Global Citizens". macjannet.org. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  45. ^ Cooke, Charles; Kahn, Jr., E. J.; Ross, Harold (22 October 1938). "Two Koos". The New Yorker. Retrieved 28 September 2018.
  46. ^ "Lionel Montgomery Caulfield-Stoker". geni_family_tree. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  47. ^ a b c d e "From Chanel to Valentino, a First Look at the Dresses in the Met's "China: Through the Looking Glass"". Vogue. Vogue. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  48. ^ a b "Hoyningen-Huene – Vogue 1929". Getty Images. Archived from the original on 9 February 2021. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  49. ^ "Madame Wellington Koo sitting for her portrait by Mr Edmund Dulac at his studio , 117 Ladbroke Road 19 August 1921 Hui-lan Oei was the daughter of Chinese businessman Oei Tiong Ham. Her marriage to Chinese diplomat and politician Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo, was announced in October 1920, when Wellington Koo was Chinese Minister to the United States. In early 1921, Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo was appointed the Chinese Minister to Great Britain and they lived in London until June 1946, though they divorced shortly after the Second World War". Europeana Collections. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  50. ^ "Horst P. Horst. Oei Huilan (the former Madame Wellington Koo) (1943) Artsy". www.artsy.net. Artsy. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  51. ^ "VCM". masterpieces.asemus.museum (in Korean). Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  52. ^ "China: Through the Looking Glass. The Metropolitan Museum of Art". www.metmuseum.org. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  53. ^ Dirgapradja, Stanley (15 February 2018). "Video Koleksi Fall Winter 2018 TOTON Adalah Film Pendek Horor yang Stylish". fimela.com. Fimela.com. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
  54. ISBN 9786029575200
    .
  55. ISBN 9786028814188
    . Retrieved 14 April 2018.
  56. ISBN 9786028814164
    . Retrieved 14 April 2018.
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