Oei Tjie Sien

Oei Tjie Sien was a businessman originating from Fujian province, China. a supply officer with the Taipings, fled China for Java in 1858. During the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) he served as a supply officer with the Taipings, but fled China for Java in 1858.

He arrived in Semarang in 1858 at the age of twenty-three, having fled China for Java during the Taiping rebellion. He married into a locally established family and with exceptional enterprise followed the traditional path to economic success as part of the peranakan-dominated economy. In 1863 Oei Tjie Sien founded a small business in Semarang buying and selling colonial produce and specializing in sugar. He named it the Kian Gwan kongsi. Oei expanded his enterprises during the economic boom following the Agrarian Law of 1870. By the mid-1880s he was well positioned to take advantage of the economic crisis that was then ruining Java's opium farmers. In 1886 his son Oei Tiong Ham, about twenty years old at the time, was named Chinese lieutenant of Semarang, a sure sign that the Oei family had arrived. The Oeis moved into opium farming in 1890-91 at a time when many former farmers were declaring bankruptcy. They acquired opium farms in Semarang, Surakarta, Yogyakarta, and Surabaya.

Oei Tjie Sien was a frugal man and a traditionalist who followed the old ways of Amoy as he remembered them. He insisted on a Chinese education for his sons, and Oei Tiong Ham was therefore sent to an old-style Chinese school. But he also provided him lessons in Malay, the peranakan “lingua franca”. During Oei Tiong Ham's entire lifetime he evidently communicated in Hokkien dialect and Malay, using interpreters when necessary. He never learned Dutch.