About Overseas Chinese Museum

Overseas Chinese Museum

The Overseas Chinese Museum, in Chinese the Huaqiao Bowuyuan, stands at 493 Siming South Road in Xiamen, Fujian Province, at the foot of Fengchao Hill near Xiamen University and the South Putuo Temple. It holds a double distinction in Chinese museum history. It was China's first museum built with funds raised by overseas Chinese, and it was the first institution in China to systematically collect, research and display the history and achievements of the overseas Chinese. It was initiated in 1956 by Tan Kah Kee, the Singapore-based Fujianese entrepreneur and philanthropist better known in Chinese as Chen Jiageng, and it opened to the public in May 1959.

The museum is a comprehensive institution as well as a specialist one. Alongside its displays on the overseas Chinese, it presents Tan Kah Kee's own donated collection of ancient Chinese art, including bronzes, ceramics, coins, calligraphy and painting, and a natural history display of bird, animal, fish and mineral specimens. Its three permanent exhibitions, on the overseas Chinese, on the Tan Kah Kee collection and on nature, are open to the public free of charge throughout the year.

Tan Kah Kee, the founder

Tan Kah Kee was born on 21 October 1874 in Jimei, near Xiamen, and travelled to Singapore at the age of sixteen to work in his father's rice business. After his father's business collapsed, he built his own commercial empire from rubber plantations and manufacturing, sawmills, canneries, real estate, import and export brokerage, ocean transport and rice trading, employing tens of thousands of people at its peak and earning him the nickname the Henry Ford of Malaya. He returned to China in 1950 and died in Beijing in 1961, receiving a state funeral.

What distinguished Tan was the use he made of his fortune. He founded and financed schools in Singapore and in his home province on an extraordinary scale, establishing the Jimei schools in his home village from 1913 and founding Xiamen University in 1921, which he maintained for sixteen years before the government took it over in 1937. He also mobilised the overseas Chinese communities of Southeast Asia in support of China at successive crises. The Overseas Chinese Museum, proposed in 1956 when Tan was in his eighties, belongs to the same pattern: an institution funded by the diaspora, built in his home city, and devoted to preserving knowledge. According to the museum's accounts, Tan personally presided over the museum project.

Founding in 1956 and opening in 1959

The museum was initiated in 1956 and opened to the public in May 1959. It was funded by donations raised from overseas Chinese and returned overseas Chinese, with Tan Kah Kee presiding over its creation. That funding model was itself the museum's first statement: the community whose history the museum would tell had paid for the building that would tell it. Fujian provincial and Xiamen sources describe it consistently as the first cultural and exhibition institution in China funded by overseas Chinese.

The choice of Xiamen was natural. Fujian is one of the great emigrant provinces of China, the ancestral home of a large share of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and Xiamen was historically one of its principal ports of departure. Tan's own life traced exactly that route, from Jimei to Singapore and back. A museum of overseas Chinese history placed anywhere else would have lacked that direct connection between subject, founder and place.

The building on Siming South Road

The museum building stands at the foot of Fengchao Hill on Siming South Road, close to Xiamen University, the university Tan founded, and to the South Putuo Temple. Descriptions of the museum characterise it as a building in Chinese palace style, constructed with white granite and a green glazed-tile roof, giving it the formal, traditional appearance associated with major cultural institutions built in China in the 1950s.

Accounts of the museum give its building area as more than 3,000 square metres, with an exhibition area of around 2,400 square metres in three exhibition halls. Within that compact footprint the museum accommodates its three permanent exhibitions and its storage and research functions. Its position in the city is part of its meaning: the museum sits within a small landscape of institutions created by or associated with the overseas Chinese, looking out over the port city from which so many emigrants sailed.

The overseas Chinese exhibition

The museum's defining exhibition presents the history of the overseas Chinese. The original historical display was arranged, according to museum descriptions, in six sections. These covered the production and development of the overseas Chinese; the tragedies and hardships suffered by emigrants before 1949; the friendship between overseas Chinese and the peoples of their host countries; the contributions of overseas Chinese to the motherland; the past and present of overseas Chinese communities; and a review of overseas Chinese policy.

That six-part structure is a concise history of the modern Chinese diaspora. It begins with emigration and work, acknowledges the exploitation and discrimination many emigrants endured in the era before 1949, and then turns to the more positive themes of integration abroad and contribution at home, the channel through which remittances, investment, education funding and wartime relief flowed from the diaspora back to China. The exhibition rests on a substantial documentary base: the museum holds more than 3,000 overseas Chinese historical relics and physical objects, a large body of historical documents, and more than 20,000 photographs and negatives, together with genealogies and audiovisual material relating to overseas Chinese history.

The Tan Kah Kee collection

The second permanent exhibition presents the cultural relics collected and donated by Tan Kah Kee himself. Tan was a serious collector, and his donations gave the young museum an art collection of genuine depth. The museum's holdings of ancient material include bronzes reaching back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties, ceramics, ancient coins, calligraphy and painting, carving crafts, and foreign ceramics and glassware.

The quality of the painting and calligraphy is marked by a concrete distinction: nine works in the collection are national first-grade cultural relics, and fourteen calligraphy and painting works are included in the Catalogue of Ancient Chinese Calligraphy and Painting. That combination is unusual for a museum founded on a thematic, historical mission. It means the Overseas Chinese Museum functions simultaneously as a museum of diaspora history and as a repository of classical Chinese art, and that the founder's personal collecting is preserved inside the institution he created, as evidence of the cultural patronage that overseas Chinese wealth made possible.

The wider collection and nature displays

In total the museum's collection includes more than 6,000 items, by some accounts more than 7,000 exhibits. Alongside the bronzes, ceramics, coins, calligraphy, painting and carving already described, the museum holds foreign ceramic and glassware, reflecting the overseas connections of its donors, and natural history specimens of birds, animals, fish and minerals. The third permanent exhibition, the nature exhibition, presents those specimens, including displays of rare birds, animals and aquatic creatures that earlier museum descriptions number at more than a thousand specimen pieces.

The museum has also hosted special exhibitions over the years that draw on the breadth of Chinese material culture beyond its own region. Museum descriptions list past special displays including ancient achievements of Chinese agriculture, Tang dynasty sancai three-coloured glazed pottery from Luoyang, folk relics of Inner Mongolia and material relating to mummies unearthed in Xinjiang. These travelling and special exhibitions broadened the museum's offer while its permanent displays remained anchored in the overseas Chinese theme and the founder's collection.

An education and exchange centre

The museum's recognised roles extend beyond display. Xiamen sources describe it as a national-level patriotic education and social science education centre, a national defence education base of Xiamen, and a national centre for overseas Chinese international cultural exchange. Those designations reflect the museum's subject: for descendants of emigrants visiting their ancestral region, and for students in Xiamen itself, the museum is the principal place where the story of the diaspora, its hardships, its achievements and its continuing ties to Fujian, is assembled in one narrative.

Admission policy supports that educational role. The three main exhibitions, Overseas Chinese, the Tan Kah Kee Collection Cultural Relics Exhibition and the Nature Museum, are open to the public for free throughout the year. Free admission removes the barrier between the museum and the community audiences, schools, visiting overseas Chinese families and researchers, for whom it was built.

Why this museum is unique

Many cities have museums of emigration, but the Overseas Chinese Museum is distinctive in how completely its founding embodies its subject. It was not created by a state decision to commemorate emigrants; it was initiated and presided over by the most famous overseas Chinese philanthropist of the twentieth century, paid for by overseas and returned overseas Chinese, placed in one of China's great emigrant home ports, and filled in part with the founder's own collection. The institution is therefore itself a primary artefact of the history it presents: physical proof of the diaspora's wealth, organisation and attachment to its home region.

Its dual character reinforces that significance. As a history museum, it preserves more than 3,000 diaspora relics and over 20,000 photographs documenting communities across the world. As an art museum, it holds first-grade national treasures in calligraphy, painting, bronzes and ceramics. And as a memorial, it keeps the name and example of Tan Kah Kee, who founded Xiamen University, built schools across two countries and spent a business fortune on public goods, at the centre of the story it tells.

Visiting and place in Xiamen

The museum stands at No. 493 Siming South Road in Siming District, Xiamen, Fujian, near Xiamen University and the South Putuo Temple at the foot of Fengchao Hill, and it is easily combined with those neighbouring sites in a single visit. Together, the university, the temple and the museum form a small district that expresses Xiamen's identity unusually well: a centre of learning founded by an overseas Chinese benefactor, a major Buddhist temple of the Minnan region, and the national museum of the overseas Chinese themselves.

Within the wider museum landscape of Xiamen, the Overseas Chinese Museum complements rather than duplicates the Xiamen Museum. The municipal museum tells the history of the city and region; the Overseas Chinese Museum tells the history of the people who left that region, what happened to them abroad, and what they sent and brought back. For anyone seeking to understand why Fujian's connections reach across Southeast Asia and beyond, it remains, as it was designed to be in 1956, the first place in China built to answer that question systematically.