Page 30 - Freemam Auction of Asian Art September 10th, 2016

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Property from the Collection of Hannah Simms-Lee, American missionary

and 22-year resident of the Republic of China
lots 73-75

Mrs. Simms-Lee was born Hannah Jewett Williams in Macon, American troops from the city. Diplomatic efforts to prepare
Georgia on October 28, 1895. As a young woman, Hannah met Hannah, Alan and John’s potential evacuation were completed, but
Soong Mei Ling, the future Madame Chiang Kai-shek, at a their abrupt 1942 seizure and consequent internment in a Japanese
Methodist church meeting in Macon during the period in which prison camp foiled all plans for their safety. Hannah’s and Alan’s
Miss Soong had moved to Georgia to accompany her sister and collection of precious objects and personal effects had previously
prepare for enrollment at Wesleyan College. In an impassioned been expedited back to the United States. The Simms-Lee family
memoir dictated toward the end of her life, Hannah Simms-Lee were to remain in a Japanese internment camp until 1945, where
credits that meeting for inspiring her journey to China in 1923 as a Alan tragically passed.
member of the American Church Mission of New York City. The following three lots reflect the interest in China’s scholarly
In 1925, Hannah married The Reverend Alan Walter Simms-Lee, an tradition among the nation’s literati class during the Republic period.
English rector of the Church of England and chaplain of St. John’s Unlike the ornate porcelain and lustrous jade emblematic of the
Church, Hankou (now part of Wuhan), China. She and The Qing Imperial taste, the following lots evoke earlier Chinese
Reverend Simms-Lee adopted their son John in Hankou. It was in traditions and periods –from early melding of Buddhistic and folk
these years that Hannah became reacquainted with Soong Mei Ling, iconography to China’s second golden age of bronze production in
now wife of Kuomintang Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who found the Han Dynasty.
support among native and expat community
leaders such as the Reverend Simms-Lee, Secretary
of the Hankou Rotary Club. A change in the
Reverend’s position took the family to Tianjin in
1940. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s,
Hannah worked and travelled in China, acquiring
few souvenirs of her life abroad save a collection of
personal letters, drawings and correspondences
and a number of fine antiques, both gifted and
purchased.
By 1941, the Japanese occupation of Tianjin became
complete with the withdrawal of all British and