Dunhuang Treasures – Preserving Antiquities Or Rape?

September 30, 2012 at 12:00 am (Chinese Culture, History, The Arts & Art Collecting)

A shorter edited version of this article was published in Singapore’s English language newspaper, The Straits Times, in July 2001.

A remote part of China that has captured universal attention and growing international tourist interest is its Silk Road, which encompasses romanticism, turbulent history, famed ruins, monuments and artefacts as well as an unparalleled and timeless desert landscape.

It covers mostly two large provinces of China’s outlying Gansu and Xinjiang, which occupy more than one-sixth of the country’s colossal landmass of about 10-million sq km.

In the early 20th century, it was a potentially fertile excavation site for the Western archaeologists. With strong financial backings, they and their retinues would spend prolonged periods there, hoping to uncover a long forgotten ancient civilisation that was presumed destroyed by the ravages of nature and the successive invaders.

Around 1900 and 1925, several expeditions from Britain, Russia, Germany, France, United States and Japan traversed the length and breadth of the Silk Road, pitting their knowledge and expertise against their competitors in order to beat them to it. The Western ventures yielded handsome harvests of antiquities, which their paid Asian assistants would skilfully pack into sturdy cases and loaded them onto camels for their stealthy and arduous long journeys out of China. The most famous or notorious of these archaeologists, depending on one’s point of view, was Aurel Stein(1862-1943), a naturalised British citizen, who led three expeditions there, and came away with bumper finds and resultant fame.

Stein’s greatest coup occurred in 1907. At that time Daoist abbot Wang was the self-proclaimed custodian of a secret Dunhuang cave library, which he accidentally discovered in 1900. Extremely rare 5th to 9th centuries Buddhist manuscripts, paintings and textiles had been hidden in that cave for almost 900 years. Stein succeeded in cunningly inducing this naive and semi-literate man to allow him to remove thousands of the choicest pieces (including the oldest printed book extant) for a bribe equivalent to 130 pound sterling, a sum which Stein said “would make his friends at the British Museum chuckle”.

Stein had no guilt feelings about his reprehensible dealings with Wang, even though he knew full well that the abbot was neither the owner nor had any authority to dispose of these priceless Chinese national treasures. When news of his Dunhuang booty broke, this unfamiliar oasis became world-renowned overnight. Other western and Japanese archaeologists also made their way to abbot Wang,, and they too bribed him to obtain numerous pieces.

Stein, basking in his own glory and far from being remorseful, smugly described his exploits in China as that of a “cultural interloper”. Nonetheless, he became an instant celebrity and subsequently won many public accolades in Europe, including being knighted by his British king and conferred honorary doctorates for his unprecedented Silk Road achievements. All told, Stein and his fellow Western archaeologists removed from the site about 80% of the 40,000 to 50,000 Dunhuang artifacts to Britain, Russia and France, and the remainder is scattered in China and several other Western and Asian countries.

Stein stoutly defended his actions on the grounds that , by taking these rare and fascinating relics to the West, they would be better preserved for mankind. These would be documented, studied by scholars and made available for regular public viewing. He was convinced that the Chinese had no interest in investigating their own antiquities. If left in situ, they would likely be harmed, if not destroyed, by local treasure-seekers and religious fanatics.

Despite his altruistic claim, the irony is that the overwhelming majority of his large Dunhuang collection has been hidden at the basements of the British Museum since their arrival there almost a century ago. However, Stein’s rationalisation did strike a chord with a good cross-section of his contemporary Western archaeologists and academia, but was roundly condemned by his detractors including Arthur Waley, a leading orientalist at the British Museum.

In his stern rebuke for Stein’s unedifying deeds at Dunhuang, Waley asked forthrightly how would an Englishman respond if a Chinese archaeologist obtained a hoard of mediaeval manuscripts from the custodian of a ruined English monastery through bribery and removed it to China?

As to be expected, China had no recourse except to denounce Stein indignantly, likening what he did as tantamount to “cultural robbery and plunder”, and accusing him of entering China under false pretences by concealing his real motives. The question on the mind of many is: Why did China permit these foreign archaeologists to do what they pleased on Chinese soil and virtually helping themselves to such a precious part of its accumulated cultural heritage? There were several factors.

The Chinese empire was extremely weak and crumpling, due to misrule and repeated foreign encroachments on its sovereignty through their bullying “gunboat policy”. The Chinese central government had more pressing problems to contend with than monitoring the behaviour of a handful of foreigners in the remotest parts of their vast territory. Compounding this problem, the local mandarins were hopelessly corrupt and incompetent. Their ignorance made them recklessly indifferent to the importance of protecting these national treasures for posterity. Above all, they succumbed to the charms and persuasiveness of these scheming visitors.

Should the Dunhuang relics be returned to their country of origin in the more enlightened world of the 21st century? I am sanguine that fair-minded people throughout the world would endorse such a proposal enthusiastically.

Is China capable of looking after these priceless treasures if they revert to her now? The answer is clearly in the affirmative. It is fast becoming a political and economic superpower. Since 1949, it has carried out extensive archaeological excavations on the Silk Road and elsewhere with resounding results. It has also built world-class museums in large cities and at the various well-known archaeological sites in order to showcase the new finds. Consequently, an ever increasing number of foreign tourists flock there to view these exhibits and to experience its rich culture.

Furthermore, all these finds are being systematically documented, studied by scholars and researchers and their publications are made available to their overseas counterparts. I firmly support the United Nations Resolution 38/34, passed in 1983, urging member nations with cultural relics taken from other countries to return them to their countries of origin on terms to be mutually agreed. It will be an act of statesmanship and enlightened diplomacy for countries with the largest number of the Dunhuang relics (Russia, Britain and France) to set an exemplary example for others to emulate. I implore them to do so.

Dunhuang Mogao Caves (map and photo source: Wikimedia Commons)

Lam Pin Foo

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Are You American?

March 27, 2012 at 12:00 am (Chinese Culture, Guest Writer)

An article by guest writer Sophia Chiang. Refer to “About the Writer” at the end of the post.

“Are you Chinese?” “Are you Japanese? Korean?” “What are you?” My black-haired, almond-shaped eyed, and olive complexioned six-year old son, Lleyton, was asked by his fair-skinned, blond-haired soccer teammate, Sergio Massarucci (Italian-American).

Ah… the issue of national and, more importantly self, identity has once again crept into my life, this time through the lens of my children.

My parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in the early-1960’s as graduate students. At the time, the United States was just beginning to loosen its immigration policy and, thus, the mere opportunity to immigrate to this “dream” land was intoxicating. Yet as the obvious minority in their new country and living in California’s Central Valley, their goal for their children was to “not call attention” to our differences and to fully assimilate, or in other words, “become American.”

So that’s what we did. Despite the obvious physical differences and their unshakeable Chinese-accented English, my parents became “American” in dress, in the community (PTA, politics, Girl Scouts, soccer), in cooking (my mom made a mean tuna and pasta casserole and matzo ball soup) and I tried thoroughly to shed any remaining Chinese identity. Being American meant dissolving and showing disinterest towards Chinese traditions (aside from hong bao), dying our hair lighter with Sun-In hair lightener, learning to apply makeup to make our eyes more “round”, refusing to speak, or even understand Chinese, and proclaiming our desire to only marry “American.” Looking back, I can only imagine the conflicting heartbreak felt by my parents.

It wasn’t until college and in the midst of greater diversity, openness and inquiry that I became to terms with being an Asian-American, Chinese-American, or simply American. It also helped that as China’s, Hong Kong’s and Taiwan’s economic and political standing in the world grew, so did the appreciation and respect for Chinese culture, food, and people.

So 40 years later, what has changed between my Asian-American experience and that of my children’s? Unlike my parents who felt more like an added condiment to America’s melting pot, my children and I, as American-born citizens, are the main ingredients – heck, my children and I can become the President should we choose :) . Even more so, my children as second generation Americans, have very little affiliation or roots to China, Taiwan or Hong Kong, except through their grandparents and increasingly less so through their American-born parents.

However, though we speak impeccable, accent-less English, regularly score in the 700’s on the English portion of the SATs, are student body presidents and homecoming queens, we still fail to be viewed as 100% American. Despite the tremendous progress, some things still stay the same.

Consider the basketball phenomenon Jeremy Lin who, as born, raised and educated in Northern California is arguably as American as anyone else. And yet, even the usually culturally aware The Daily Show with Jon Stewart “associated “sweat shops” and “low-cost workers” to Jeremy Lin in a humorous bit on how “Asians were now stealing away basketball from blacks”. Not having worked or lived in Asia, Jeremy Lin has about as much to do with sweat shops and low-cost workers in China as a random farmer in Iowa. It would be equivalent of saying that Larry Wilmore, the African-American Daily Show correspondent should go back to his day job of being a ruthless dictator in Africa.

Or on a more serious note, consider the recent deaths of Danny Chen and Harry Lew, American soldiers of Chinese ethnicity, who both committed suicide in Afghanistan after countless months of being taunted for months for being Asian by fellow “American” soldiers. It would seem that sacrificing and voluntarily fighting for your country would be enough proof of your American-ness, not so, if you are black-haired, yellow-skinned and with almond-shaped eyes.

The challenge of nationality is not isolated to the United States, but also in Asia. Whenever in Asia, not a day goes by without someone asking me, 你是中國人嗎? The question literally translates into “Are you Chinese?” Simple enough as a question, but loaded with nuances that are difficult to answer. Without denying my ethnic heritage, my usual answer is 我是美國人 (“I am an American.”) Their reply that follows is almost always 但是你還是中國人. (“But you are still Chinese”) Yes, I am Chinese.

Though I am proudly culturally Chinese, I have no other national affiliation than to that of the United States. Yet, I feel that because of my outward appearance, I am embraced far more by my Asian brothers and sisters as the “long-lost” wayward daughter than by my own country, the U.S. where I occasionally (usually when straying away from the coastal areas) still feel like a long-staying guest who occasionally is asked “Where are you from?” and even told to “go home…” To where, I ask?

So what is it going to take for American-Asians to be accepted and embraced as Americans?

  • I dream of a day when white and black American boys (not just the Asian American ones) pin-up Jeremy Lin posters on their walls.
  • I dream of a day when Americans regularly see American-Asian politicians representing them in Congress and the Senate.
  • I dream of a day when our Executive branch positions are held by American-Asians.
  • I dream of a day when the winners of Grammys, Tony’s and Oscars include American-Asians.

Despite the continual challenges that face Chinese Americans in how others perceive our national identity, it is far better for my children. Unlike my generation, where we often sought to deny our ethnic heritage, this generation seems to have the best of both worlds. My kids proudly speak and read Chinese, love sharing their Chinese foods and customs with other American friends and seem to have little or no angst with their Chinese-ness.

When asked by Sergio if he is Chinese, my son Lleyton confidently replied “No, I am an American.”

About the Writer

Sophia Chiang is a first-generation, American of Chinese descent. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her Taiwanese-American husband and two children. She is the CEO of Causera – a web-based social fundraising company. Like most first-generation Chinese-Americans, she was good at math and earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.B.A from MIT.

My Kids

My Husband

My Daughter and I

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Seminar Commemorating the 50th Death Anniversary of Tan Kah Kee – Champion of Education

November 30, 2011 at 1:00 am (Chinese Culture, History)

A well-attended seminar commemorating the 50th death anniversary of Tan Kah Kee (TKK), the indefatigable champion of education, was held recently at Singapore’s Hwa Chong Institution, one of several high schools founded by him. It has become one of its leading high schools. The guest of honour speaker was Mr Tharman Shamugaratnam, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Singapore, who hoped that the spirit of giving enshrined by TKK would evolve in Singapore and eventually grow, ascend and flower as an integral part of its society. The keynote address was delivered by Prof. Wang Gungwu, one of the foremost experts on overseas Chinese. It also attracted other prominent speakers from Singapore, China and Malaysia. Students from this high school and alumni representatives from Xiamen University in Fujian also spoke at this event. All of them paid glowing tributes to TKK as a life long advocate of the importance of education in national development, as a successful entrepreneur, as a generous philanthropist and finally as a Chinese patriot. A grandson of TKK, Tan Koon Poh, gave a lively account of his grandfather as a frugal family man to his children. He said today there are more than 400 descendants of his who are scattered all over the world. Since 1998 Koon Poh has helped to organise biennial trips to China to give them a better insight of the educational achievements of their ancestor and for them to get to know each other better.

The writer’s wife is one of the granddaughters of TKK. She and I were just two of the many of his extended family members from Singapore and overseas who attended this memorable seminar. My wife was too young to remember much of her famous grandfather, but can still recall vividly her family’s post World War II annual visit on Chinese New Year Day to pay their respects to him at his favourite club, Ee Hoe Hean, where they would meet numerous relatives and an endless stream of other visitors who would also call on him on this auspicious day. This club had become his home where he would spend most of his time holding meetings and discussions with others on community work, often well past midnight. He had less and less time for his own large family and seeing them only on special occasions. I had never met TKK but had garnered my knowledge of him through my late mother-in-law who had lived with her father both in Singapore and in China for a period before her marriage, and through reading books and other publications about him. I was both amused and impressed by his business acumen to marry off her daughter to my father-in-law, who was one of his ablest staff, in order that he would not lose his services to others!

TKK emigrated from his native Jimei Village, near Xiamen City in China’s Fujian Province, to Singapore in 1891 at the age of 17 in order to seek his pot of gold there. Despite having had only eight years’ schooling, he was nevertheless highly literate. He joined his father’s sundry goods business as his assistant and book-keeper. He quickly proved his entrepreneurial flair in commercial matters. By 1906, he had already become a wealthy man through the widening of his initial business activities to include rubber trading and manufacturing, rice mills and pineapple canning. From then on his businesses expanded further to encompass enterprises like shipping, real estate, shoes manufacturing and newspaper publishing. By the time he was 45, he had become one of the richest men in Singapore and in this region. He also made his mark as the undisputed leader of the Singapore’s Chinese community and his views and support were often sought by the colonial government, especially on matters which affected Chinese Singaporeans. At the peak of his commercial career between 1918 and 1925, his business enterprises throughout Southeast Asia and China employed more than 10,000 people. He had amassed a colossal fortune exceeding $12 million Singapore dollars.

By this time, he had already founded and funded many schools and colleges in his native Fujian and in Singapore and had also generously supported other charitable causes too. The poor pupils in China enjoyed free of charge schooling. In 1920, he established the first private university in China, the Xiamen University. He had earlier sought funding support from among the many wealthy Chinese business tycoons both in Singapore and in the region.To his great disappointment, not much was forthcoming. He had no choice but to almost singlehandedly funded its annual operating expenses himself in order not to delay the launch of this ambitious but much needed project. He bore this heavy financial burden for several years until financial help emerged from others, especially from his wealthy close relatives and friends. TKK continued to help finance the university and other educational institutions in China with his vastly reduced fortune even after his businesses failed because of the severe worldwide depression of the late 1920s. Altogether, he had given away virtually all his wealth of more than 12 million dollars, leaving nothing for his large family. It is estimated what he had donated to support education would be equivalent to today’s several hundred million US dollars (based on present day purchase price parity computation).

What motivated TKK to give away all his wealth to advance education in China and elsewhere? In a nutshell, he believed with unwavering conviction that it was only through education that a nation could become economically and technologically advanced. In the context of the then China, the bulk of its massive population were illiterate as they could not afford basic schooling. His own native Fujian Province was no exception. With a population of more than 10 million, it had a paucity of schools and no university until he established the Xiamen University there in 1920.

Besides being a philanthropist extraordinary, TKK was a passionate believer in social justice for Singapore’s Chinese Singaporeans. Whenever they were unfairly treated by the colonial government. he would fearlessly speak up for them or take firm action to protect their interests. As a Chinese national living overseas, he remained patriotic to his motherland. For instance, when Japan invaded China in 1937 and an eight-year war ensued between them, TKK took immediate decisive action to raise large sums of money from the Chinese community in Singapore to support China’s war efforts against the Japanese invaders. He also organised a contingent of Chinese Singaporean volunteers to participate in the war. In view of his unflinching anti-Japan stand, the Japanese military regime would have had him killed when they conquered Singapore in 1941. He managed to escape to Indonesia, which also fell to the Japanese, and succeeded to survive there, largely because he was loyally shielded by the Chinese community during his four years’ stay. I learnt that he always had with him a packet of poison substance so that he could swallow it and die as a patriot if needs be, rather than falling into the enemy’s hands and be executed by them. TKK returned to Singapore after the war and was accorded a rousing welcome by its Chinese community.

TKK continued his active public work in Singapore and kept in close touch with the progress of his educational institutions in China. He finally decided to return to China for good in 1950 so that he could devote his time there to more closely supervising those institutions established by him. He died in 1961 at the age of 87 at a Beijing hospital. He was accorded a state funeral presided over by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and attended by many top Chinese political elites and other prominent Chinese from other walks of life. Even Chairman Mao praised him as an outstanding overseas Chinese leader and a glory to the Chinese race. A rare honour indeed for TKK who had lived in Singapore for more than 60 years of his life and his passing was deeply mourned in his adopted country. He was buried in his beloved native Jimei Village, very close to some of the educational institutions founded by him. His entire asset exceeding one million RMB, a considerable sum then, was given to the educational bodies there, and none to his family.

TKK has often been compared with the legendary American multi-millionaires Dale Carnegie and Henry Ford, both of whom had richly endowed educational institutions in America and had also set up trust foundations to do so to this day. However, there is a fine distinction between him and them and the rich anywhere else. In TKK’s case he gave away virtually his entire fortune leaving practically nothing at all for his large family; his counterparts in other countries would always preserve a significant portion of their enormous wealth for their own family members, before giving the remainder away. It is quite unlikely that Singapore or any other country can produce someone as selfless as TKK for a long time to come. Another hallmark of his greatness was that he eschewed self-glorification for what he had done and had firmly declined repeated attempts by educational institutions founded by him to name some of the important buildings or other facilities in his honour.

Long after TKK’s death, another feather in his cap came from an unexpected source. In order to further enhance his international reputation as a life long staunch supporter of education, Prof. Y.T Lee, of the University of California’s world-renowned Berkeley Campus, who is a chemistry Nobel price winner and an ardent admirer of TKK, spearheaded a fund raising campaign in 1990 to have the new US$ 40 million 7-storey new postgraduate chemical engineering building named after him provided he succeeded in raising US$ 8.5 million by a certain deadline. The professor, who had never met TKK, believed that this would be a concrete recognition of TKK’s achievements and unwavering belief in the importance of education in national development, which has a universal value, and Berkeley would be the suitable place to do it. He then traveled to many cities in the States and to Southeast Asia and Hong Kong at his own expense to persuade would be donors to support this worthy project. His hard work over several years finally paid off and he managed to obtain the 8.5 million needed to name the structure after TKK. The bulk of the money came from donors in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand and United States. The Tan Kah Kee Hall is commonly called the Tan (pronounced as Ten) Hall by Berkeley staff and students for ease of remembering it.

This brings to mind an article that I wrote in 1997 on TKK’s contributions to education and his achievements in business and in other fields, and the naming of the chemical engineering building at Berkeley in his honour . An edited version appeared as the Cover Story in Singapore’s leading newspaper The Straits Times’ Life! Supplement on September 11, 1997. I would like to share the original version of it with my readers and it is posted immediately after the above article.

Lam Pin Foo

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Berkeley, University of California, Named a Building in Honour of Tan Kah Kee

November 30, 2011 at 12:00 am (Chinese Culture, Current Affairs, History)

The edited version of this article was first published by Singapore’s The Straits Times as the cover story in its Life! Supplement on September 11, 1997.

Among the prominent ethnic Chinese business leaders in Southeast Asia, one man stands apart from the rest of the pack and achieved a stature and acclaim not accorded to others. His name is Tan Kah Kee (1874-1961), who became a legend in his life time. A man of great vision, drive and unflinching convictions, he was an indefatigable champion of education and social justice, and a philanthropist par excellence and patriot.

Throughout his long life, he utilised his considerable financial resources and personal influence for the maximum benefit of the communities in China, Singapore and the region. Tan Kah Kee’s greatest and most enduring contributions, for which posterity will remember him affectionately, are in the field of education.

He was the first Chinese to have founded a major university, the Xiamen University, single-handedly. He also founded colleges and schools in his native Jimei, near Xiamen in Fujian province, and provided the pupils there with free education at a time when this was inaccessible. His colleges in Jimei came of age in recent years and were upgraded to a full-fledge university in 1996, a dream envisaged by him long ago.

In Singapore, many schools and tertiary institutions had benefited from his farsighted leadership and munificence. The Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce set up the Tan Kah Kee Foundation and also endowed a chair in history at the Nanyang Technological University to promote scholarship and innovations in his memory.

Thirty-five years after his death, his fame has now spread beyond the shores of Asia, to far away United States. The world-renowned University of California, Berkeley, which has produced more Nobel prize winners than any other universities, recently commissioned a US$ 40 million major science building and named it Tan Kah Kee Hall, in recognition of his distinguished service to education.

How the Berkeley accolade came about makes interesting reading. In the 1980s, the University was planning to construct a major chemical engineering building to cater to its growing needs. It would consider naming it after a deserving benefactor who would donate a substantial sum towards the building cost.

Professor Y T Lee, then teaching chemistry at Berkeley and who was the fourth ethnic Chinese to have won a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1986, is an ardent admirer of Tan Kah Kee for his selfless and unwavering commitment to education for its own sake. He believed that Tan ought to have international recognition, such as extended to Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, for his unprecedented efforts and exceptional achievements and that Berkeley would be an eminently suitable forum for it. This would also raise the level of American awareness of Chinese culture and civilisation, and their profound love and respect for scholarship, which most Americans were blissfully ignorant of.

With the active support of Prof. Tien Chang-Lin, the first Chinese-American to be appointed Chancellor of Berkeley in 1990 and himself an admirer of Tan Kah Kee, Prof. Lee spearheaded the unenviable and daunting task to raise the targeted sum of US$ 8.5 million in order to secure the naming right in honour of the famous educationalist. He then travelled around the United States, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and other ASEAN countries at his own expense in order to seek support and donations for this worthy cause. Everywhere he went he received an enthusiastic response from many quarters, including Dr K K Phua of the Tan Kah Kee Foundation here, who immediately grasped the significance of his quest.

The aim was not to confine the fund-raising campaign to only the rich and powerful and those who knew Tan Kah Kee or were related to him. From the outset, the organisers felt that it would be more meaningful for those who simply admired his greatness but had nothing at all to do with him to also come forward spontaneously to support the project.

Through the untiring efforts of Prof. Lee and the numerous co-campaigners who shared his vision, widespread public donations from both continents poured in and the mission was thus successfully accomplished, several years after the idea was first mooted. The bulk of the donations came from Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand and the United States.

The seven-storey Tan Kah Kee Hall is primarily used for postgraduate teaching and research, and houses a number of laboratories, a large lecture hall, a state-of-the-art computer facility, conference rooms and administrative offices. It is part of the College of Chemistry and has enhanced the needs of its School of Chemical Engineering.

The Berkeley project led to the formation of the Tan Kah Kee International Society, with Prof. Lee as its first chairman and Singaporean Dr K K Phua as Secretary, to further Tan’s aims to propagate education and culture including the raising of funds to expand the Overseas Chinese Museum in Xiamen and the conversion of the Jimei colleges into a university.

What propelled Tan Kah Kee to persevere in his abiding labour of love with education? What makes his achievements so unique, in view that many prominent business tycoons everywhere also actively support education and charitable projects? With only eight years’ schooling, he emigrated to Singapore at the age of 17 to help his father run his sundry goods business. He quickly showed his mettle in business. By 1906, he had become a wealthy businessman, with interests which included rubber trading and manufacturing, rice mills and pineapple canning.

His businesses continued to expand and prosper by leaps and bounds, and he ventured into new fields such as shipping, sawmills, real estate and shoe manufacturing. By the time he was 45, he had become one of the richest men in Singapore and Malaya. Tan Kah Kee believed passionately that, for any nation to be strong and economically affluent, its people must first become literate and well-educated. He often lamented that, while China is a country with 5000 years of continuous civilisation, a vast number of Chinese were too poor to attend school, and that education was a luxury that only the well off could afford to indulge in.

His own native Fujian province was a case in point. It was then one of the poorer parts of China. With a population of more than 10 millions, there was a paucity of schools and no university to speak of. His simple philosophy was that, as one derives one’s wealth from the community in which one operates in, it is imperative that this should be extended to the advantage of the community and not for personal glorification. He began to practise what he firmly believed in by initiating and establishing a succession of schools in Jimei from 1913 onwards, and providing the funds needed to uplift the children of poor homes in Fujian. This was followed by the founding of a teachers’ training college and colleges for agriculture and forestry, fisheries and marine navigation, also in Jimei.

His generosity extended to schools elsewhere in the province, where such support was most acutely felt. Not content with merely endowing these infant institutions, he took a continuing interest in their management through regular correspondence and by making periodic prolonged visits there in order to keep abreast with their progress and development. Tan Kah Kee’s enterprises reached their zenith between 1919 and 1925. He was now one of the richest entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia, with a net worth of more than $12 millions, a colossal fortune in those distant days. His business empire became even more diversified and spread out in China and throughout the region, employing a combined workforce exceeding 10,000.

Tan Kah Kee was most fortunate to have had good people working for him. Two of his most able and trusted employees, Lee Kong Chian, the would be rubber magnate and founder of Lee Foundation and Oon Khye Hong, a chemical engineer from MIT, became his sons-in-law; while the third, the legendary and inimitable Tan Lark Sye, who also made his fortunes in rubber, co-founded the Nanyang University in 1955 and donated $5 millions to it.

In 1919, he launched his most ambitious project, the setting up of the Xiamen University. An initial funding of $1 million was needed, together with an operating budget of $3 millions for the next 12 years. With his characteristic decisiveness and resolve, he decided to shoulder the above financial burden himself, in order not to delay the launch of this momentous scheme.

He later described vividly his repeated futile attempts to raise the urgently needed endowment fund, from amongst the richest Chinese in the region for the long term viability of the fledgling University, as one of the most disappointing episodes of his life. Simultaneous with supporting education in China, Tan Kah Kee did not forget the needs of his adopted country. He led the establishment and funding of several Chinese language schools in Singapore from 1918 onwards, which were then grossly neglected by the colonial government.

Among the schools that owe their existence to his pioneering efforts are the Chinese High School and Nanyang Girls’ High School, both of which have become leading schools here. He also made substantial donations to the local English language institutions including the Anglo Chinese School and Raffles College, one of the predecessor institutions of the National University of Singapore. The dark clouds of the Great Depression of the late 1920s started to cast its sinister impact on his extensive business ventures, as the Malayan and Singapore economies took a precipitous plunge which resulted in drastic declines in rubber and tin prices, the two territories’ biggest revenue earners.

Even while Tan Kah Kee was trying desperately, to keep his businesses afloat and to cope with the mounting cash-flow problems, he continued to finance his educational projects in China, rather than let them flounder due to lack of funds. Even after the inevitable winding up of his business conglomerate in 1934, he still managed to remit monies to China, relying on his now greatly reduced personal resources and generous financial assistance of his loyal friends and relatives. It must have been a tremendous relief to him that the Chinese Government was finally prevailed upon to take over the financing and running of Xiamen University in 1940. He retired to Jimei in 1950, and devoted much of his time to overseeing the direction and development of the schools and colleges he founded there.

What makes Tan Kah Kee’s contributions to education so unique was his all-consuming belief in its importance and role in nation building, to the extent that, instead of giving only a portion of his wealth as other benefactors the world over would have done, he gave practically all he had for the advancement of education, leaving virtually nothing to his own large family. Moreover, it is a hallmark of his greatness that he eschewed personal publicity and recognition for what he had done and had consistently and tenaciously declined repeated attempts by his well-wishers to have some of the important edifices named after him.

He died in 1961 at the age of 87 and was buried in his beloved native Jimei. He left his entire fortune of more than ¥1 million RMB to the schools there, which he first founded almost 50 years earlier. Today, his birthplace has become one of the top attractions in Xiamen as visitors, both from China and overseas, flock there to pay fitting tributes to a visionary who was well ahead of his time.

Lam Pin Foo

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