Oei Hui-lan (Chinese: 黃蕙蘭; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Ûiⁿ Hūi-lân; 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.

[1][2][3][4] 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.

[5] 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.

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.

[5] Her mother, Goei Bing-nio, was her father's senior wife[6] and – unlike the nouveau riche Oei family – came from the Cabang Atas, the traditional Chinese establishment of colonial Indonesia.

[7][8][9] Through her mother, Hui-lan was descended from the merchant-mandarin Goei Poen Kong (1765–1806),[10] who served as estate master or Boedelmeester,[11] then Luitenant der Chinezen in Semarang in the late eighteenth century.

[12][13] 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.

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.

"[30] 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.

"[18] 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.

[17][18][32] She also reveled in avant-garde fashion:[32][33] "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.

"[34] 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.

[24][22] 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".

[35] 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.

[3][4][5][36] 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.

[18][32] 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.

[3][4][5][33] 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.

[33][39][40] 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.

[2][17] Hui-lan, however, found Shanghai in the 1920s wanting,[33] and thought it "filled with...British shipping people...nobodies at home...[who] put on upper-class airs in China...they were so insular, so middle-class...and looked down their noses at everything really beautiful and indigenous to...[Chinese] culture: jade, porcelain, antiques.

[17] In the summer of 1939, she attended Elsie de Wolfe's party for the Maharani of Kapurthala at Villa Trianon in Versailles with a guest list that included Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli; some considered it Europe's last swan song before the Second World War.

[45] The business empire her grandfather and father built had been broken up by Sukarno following the Indonesian Revolution; and the Republic of China which she and her husband served for many decades had lost the Chinese mainland to the Communist Party.

Under the pen name Agnes Davonar, popular writers Agnes Li and Teddy Li authored a sentimental and sensationalist biography of Madame Koo, Kisah tragis Oei Hui Lan, putri orang terkaya di Indonesia (The Tragic Story of Oei Hui Lan, Daughter of Indonesia's Richest Man), published in 2009 by AD Publisher.