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. 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.
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. Her father, the tycoon Majoor-titulair Oei Tiong Ham, headed 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.
Her mother, Goei Bing-nio, was her father's senior wife 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.
Hui-lan, who used the name Angèle in her youth, had an elder sister, Oei Tjong-lan, aka Gwendoline, from the same mother. In addition, her father had 18 junior wives and acknowledged concubines, as well as some 42 acknowledged children, including her half-brother Oei Tjong Hauw.
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. 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:
"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 R.A. Kartini, a Javanese aristocrat and pioneering women's rights activist. 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.
Marriage to Beauchamp Caulfield-Stoker (1909–1920) In 1909, in Semarang, Indonesia,The Straits Times 10 November 1909 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."A Boycotted Wife: Chinese Lady Obtains Service in England, Married to Englishman in Java", Malaya Tribune, 24 May 1920, page 8Chamion Caballero and Peter J. Aspinall, Mixed Race in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Springer, 2018), page 164–165 The following year they moved to England,The Washington Post, 16 May 1920, page 1 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. The couple had one son, Lionel Montgomery Caulfield-Stoker (1912–1954), and divorced in London on 19 April 1920. Hui-lan then lived with her mother and sister at their townhouse in Mayfair, London. This period of her life—when she was known in the society pages as Countess Hoey [an Anglicization of Oei] Stoker"From the Far East", Tatler, 24 March 1920, page 19"The Beautiful Daughter of the Rockefeller of Japan", Tatler, 28 August 1918, page 19"A Chic and Charming Chinese Lady", Tatler, 28 May 1924, page 25 (presumably because her father had been called a count by some) and preferred to be called Lady StokerThe Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 4 October 1919, Page 12—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 Sketch noted that "Countess Hoey Stoker is one of the best-known figures in London Society. She is the daughter of...the 'Rockefeller of China'." 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." Margaret Macdonald observed Hui-lan, dressed as a Chinese ("which in reality she is"), at a costume party at The Ritz, also attended by Lady Diana Manners, the Duchess of Sutherland and Margot Asquith. Hui-lan reveled in the dancing and fashion opportunities provided by London high society. She also reveled in avant-garde fashion: "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".Koo & Taves, 1975 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."
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". 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 and on grounds of cruelty and misconduct. 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"."The Chinese Wife", Birmingham Daily Gazette, 22 April 1920, page 4
Marriage to Wellington Koo (1920–1958)
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.Jonathan Clements, Wellington Koo: China 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."Wellington Koo '09 Married", Columbia Alumni News, 19 November 1920, page 103 The bride wore an antique veil and an ivory gown by Callot Soeurs. 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.
The couple began their married life in Geneva, where Koo had been involved in the formation of the League of Nations. 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. 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.Susanna Hoe, Chinese Footprints: Exploring Women's History in China, Hong Kong and Macau (Roundhouse Publications (Asia) Limited, 1996), page 86 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. 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.