ADAM'S Fine Asian Art 25th June 2025

JADE ACROSS OCEANS: A BABA COLLECTOR’S LEGACY OF THE MARITIME SILK ROAD Tan Sri Mr. Lee is a fourth-generation Chinese Malaysian and a recipient of one of Malaysia’s highest civilian honors. His family traces its origins to Guangdong, China, where his ancestors migrated southward in the 19th century in search of opportunity. For generations, the Lee family has safeguarded Chinese cultural memory through the appreciation of material heritage, maintaining a deep spiritual connection to their ancestral roots within the Nanyang. Mr. Lee’s grandfather founded Tong Chun Tong, a traditional Chinese medicine hall in Ipoh that served not only as a place of healing but also as a cultural salon for the local Chinese community. Inspired by this legacy, his mother later established a Chinese temple in Ipoh and organized Chinese communities from Malaysia and Singapore to worship ancestors, study Buddhist teachings, and promote traditional culture—embodying the family’s enduring belief in “conveying the Dao through objects, and transmitting tradition through things.” The Lee family’s jade collection is widely recognized in Malaysia. In 1957, Nanyang Siang Pau published an article titled “Private Collection of the Overseas Chinese Lee Family” highlighting their collection. The present selection features 48 groups of Chinese jades ranging from the Neolithic period to the Ming and Qing dynasties, many of which are presented to the European market for the first time. Some pieces were acquired through Hong Kong trading companies during the 1940s. Within Malaysia’s Peranakan (Baba-Nyonya) culture, the Lee family has also preserved the tradition of jade as heirloom adornment— especially jade pendants used as clasps on traditional Kebaya attire—testifying to the long-standing cultural and aesthetic exchange between China and Southeast Asia. This is not merely an exhibition of Asian art—it is an epic story told through jade, a poetic chronicle of the Chinese diaspora within the tropics. Within these treasured objects, we recall the refined leisure of Nyonya tea gatherings. It reflects both the transformation of Chinese jade culture in the Nanyang and the rainforest’s poetic response to Eastern aesthetics. Large quantities of Chinese jade entered Southeast Asia via the Maritime Silk Road, becoming key material carriers of inter- civilizational exchange. According to a 2023 study by the National University of Singapore based on trace-element analysis, approximately 23% of Chinese-style jades excavated in Southeast Asia can be traced back to China. For instance, the 9th-century Belitung Shipwreck in the Java Sea, though known primarily for its ceramics, also yielded fragments of Tang dynasty jade belt plaques, revealing the transmission of official jade regalia overseas; a Song dynasty openwork jade pendant excavated in Pahang, Malaysia, closely mirrors designs found in the Huang Sheng tomb in Fujian, suggesting it was carried by Min merchants as luxury cargo; a 17th- century dragon-shaped plaque from the Malay Peninsula shows incised patterns characteristic of Suzhou’s Zhuozhu Lane jade workshops, while its ruby-inlaid dragon eyes align with the aesthetic preferences of the Aceh Sultanate. One piece of jade, two homelands—this is an aesthetic migration from the Kunlun Mountains to the equatorial rainforest. When a Peranakan jade heirloom reemerges in the Nanyang, it becomes more than an object of beauty—it becomes a living annotation in the story of Chinese civilization.