Her Lotus Year – Madame Wellington Koo

Posted: March 28th, 2025 | No Comments »

Koo Vi Kyuin, better known to everyone as Wellington Koo (and now often Gu Weijun in China). He had grown up in a well-to-do Shanghai cosmopolitan family and was educated at Shanghai’s St. John’s University and at Columbia in New York. In 1912, he had returned to work for President Yuan Shih-kai
and then, at just twenty-seven, was appointed China’s ambassador to the United States. In China and abroad, Koo was best known for having been the Chinese diplomat who refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference over objections to Japan’s Great War land grab in Shantung. He had since served as both China’s foreign minister and finance minister.

He was still only thirty-seven and married to the beautiful daughter of a Chinese-Javanese
sugar baron, Oei Hui-lan. They were the most celebrated couple on the Peking circuit, and Wallis attended a dinner at their home at least once in the company of her then lover Alberto da Zara. How they got along is not recorded—at the time, Oei Hui-lan was apparently exasperated at the number of dinners she was having to arrange in their home.

Twenty years later, Madame Koo was in London, as her husband was the wartime Chinese ambassador to Britain. Wallis was now the Duchess of Windsor, and the infamous China Dossier had spread a great deal of gossip about her China time. Madame Koo made the comment that Wallis knew only four words of Chinese: “Boy, pass the champagne.” This is a somewhat catty story in a rather catty memoir, not to mention the phrase being actually unrenderable in the exact form Oei Hui-lan suggests.

This portrait is by Olive Snell, a South African born English artist – her portrait of Oei Hui-lan was painted in 1927, a few years after Wallis met her in Peking.

Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…

---