The Kwee family of Ciledug was an influential bureaucratic and business dynasty of the 'Cabang Atas' or the Chinese gentry of the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia).
[1][2][3] From the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, they featured prominently in the colonial bureaucracy of Java as Chinese officers, and played an important role in the sugar industry.
[2][3] By the mid-nineteenth century, Kwee had associated himself with the Cabang Atas through his wife, Oei Tjoen Nio, a probable sister-in-law of Tan Kim Lim, Kapitein der Chinezen (grandfather of Tan Tjin Kie, Majoor-titulair der Chinezen), whose family had served as Chinese officers since the start of the nineteenth century in Cirebon and Batavia, capital of the Indies.
[3] In October 1874, Boen Pien was installed as Luitenant der Chinezen of the districts of Sindanglaut, Losari and Ciledug – the family's first Chinese officer.
[3] Like their ancestor Kwee Giok San, successive generations of his descendants contracted strategic marriages with other families of the Cabang Atas.
[2][3] Family members of the fourth and fifth generations who matured in the 1910s were 'agents of change' and 'carriers of modernity' in the words of the Dutch historian Peter Post, in particular the daughter and three sons of Luitenant Kwee Keng Liem's second marriage.
[3] By 1916, the family had four automobiles; and by the 1920s they had acquired two luxury cars: a Pierce-Arrow (also owned by the likes of Emperor Hirohito of Japan and Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran) and a Marmon.
[3] During the Indonesian Revolution (1945—1949), the Kwee family befriended their neighbor in Linggadjati, Sutan Sjahrir, the first Prime Minister of Indonesia, and offered their compound as a venue for Dutch-Indonesian peace negotiations.