Inside the private Chinese art collection of Joseph Hotung, Hong Kong property magnate, which has been hidden from the public gaze for decades – until now
- While much of Joseph Hotung’s collection of Chinese jades and Yuan and Ming dynasty porcelains is already on display, now his private cache is coming to light
One fateful day in the early 1970s, Joseph Hotung’s flight leaving San Francisco was delayed. With two hours to spare before heading to the airport, the then forty-something Hong Kong businessman wandered into an art gallery, where he became suddenly, instantly enamoured by a pair of translucent, identical jade bowls.
Born into one of the wealthiest Hong Kong families, Hotung followed a career path in property and investment, until his Bay Area jade encounter.
After buying the matching Qing dynasty (1644-1911) pieces, he quickly became an avid art collector. Before long, he was known in cultural circles for his extensive Chinese jade collection and, by 1993, as a global arts benefactor and philanthropist, he was knighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth.
Recalling that serendipitous day in San Francisco, Hotung told the South China Morning Post in 1996 that discovering jade “has been fascinating because it’s given me a totally new interest in life, and a new dimension”.
While as a public collector, Hotung’s affinity for jade was never hidden – many of his pieces are on display at London’s British Museum, where three galleries, including China and South Asia, are named after him – his private acquisitions were another matter.
For decades only his family, inner circle and personal guests at his homes knew which pieces he had kept for private appreciation, and why.
