Oei Hui-lan

Oei Hui-lan (; 21 December 1889 – 1992), known as Madame Wellington Koo, was a Chinese-Indonesian international socialite and style icon, and from late 1926 until 1927, the First Lady of the Republic of China.

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

Oei Hui-lan was born on 21 December 1889 into a leading Peranakan Chinese family in Semarang, Central Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. and – unlike the nouveau riche Oei family – came from the Cabang Atas, the traditional Chinese establishment of colonial Indonesia. Through her mother, Hui-lan was descended from the merchant-mandarin Goei Poen Kong (1765–1806), who served as estate master or Boedelmeester, then Luitenant der Chinezen in Semarang in the late eighteenth century. 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. 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. This mirrored the westernization of the Cabang Atas in colonial Indonesia from the late nineteenth century onwards. In addition to her native Malay (Indonesian), Hui-lan acquired fluent English and French, and decent Hokkien, Mandarin and Dutch.

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: Despite their cosmopolitan background, the Oei sisters' contact with Javanese culture appears to have been restricted to interactions with servants, and being taken by their mother on courtesy visits and gamelan performances to various Javanese royal courts. Hui-lan (using the surname Oeitiongham) married Beauchamp Forde Gordon Caulfield-Stoker (1877–1949), an Anglo-Irishman who was the British consular agent in Semarang, and eventually represented his father-in-law's sugar interests in London. The following year they moved to England, where they lived first at 33 Lytton Grove and then at Graylands, Augustus Road, Wimbledon Common, which had been purchased for them by her father in 1915. (presumably because her father had been called a count by some) and preferred to be called Lady Stoker —she omitted from her memoirs.

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. The society magazine Tatler described her as having "a fondness for aviation and [being] among the first ladies to indulge in civilian flying", while The Times noted that "no dance or other function was complete without [her]...a famous beauty who drove her own motor car about London…a little grey two-seater Rolls Royce that could often be seen threading rapidly through traffic." Hui-lan reveled in the dancing and fashion opportunities provided by London high society. She also reveled in avant-garde fashion: 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."

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, Columbia-educated Chinese diplomat and politician V. K. Wellington Koo, himself a divorcé and a recent widower with two small children. 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. 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. The bride wore an antique veil and an ivory gown by Callot Soeurs. Wellington Koo served twice as Acting Premier, first in 1924, then again from 1 October 1926 until 16 June 1927. Hui-lan recalls in her memoirs that Wallis's only phrase in Mandarin was "boy, pass me the champagne". In contrast, she was enamoured of pre-communist Beijing, whose classical order and ancient beauty she thought was comparable only to Paris. Her eldest son, Lionel Caulfield-Stoker, lived in England with his father and stepmother, Nora.

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. 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.

By the time she died in 1992, she had survived her former husband and both their sons. She is widely acknowledged for reinventing the Chinese cheongsam in a way that accentuates and flatters the female figure.

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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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).

Ancestry

List of works Hui-lan Koo (Madame Wellington Koo): An Autobiography as Told to Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer New York: Dial Press (1943) No Feast Lasts Forever New York: Times Books (1975)