Hong Kong Collectors: Chris Hall’s Amazing Chinese Textiles

Chris Hall likes colour. It is there in the dapper, confident way he dresses, with check suit and bright socks, embracing vibrant hues. He invites you into his sumptuous apartment and takes pleasure at your wonderment, as visitors marvel at the large portraits and other paintings on the walls of the main room. Down a dark teal-painted corridor adorned with China trade paintings and golden door knockers, we sneak a peek at a beautiful four-poster in his bedroom. 

It’s Hall’s love of colour that led him to eschew monotone white porcelain or common varieties of jade as items to collect when, as a young tax accountant nearly 50 years ago, he first embarked on a decades-long passion for Chinese silk textiles. Now he has one of the most significant collections in the world.

“This is about 2,500 years old and it has a dragon and phoenix design,” he says as he unpacks a piece with a mix of browns from tissue paper in his textile room. This is an amazing place to be. A large wooden cupboard houses wide slim drawers, each one holding treasures in tissue paper as Hall carefully unpacks them for perusal. 

“It would have been part of a bolt of silk and may have been part of a robe but I do not know exactly. From the Warring States,” he explains, referring to the independent states that were eventually united to form imperial China. Hall, 73, runs a tax accountancy business, a way, he quietly jokes, to enable him to acquire more items for his collection. Gradually, over the next decade, the collection will be given in its entirety to the Hong Kong Palace Museum. Hall is also bequeathing the museum his beautiful apartment on the Peak.  

About a hundred of Hall’s Chinese textile treasures are currently being shown at the museum in an exhibition, A History of China in Silk: The Chris Hall Collection, until the end of the year. Hall has collected nearly 3,000 works. What is also important about this collection is Hall’s legacy.  What started as a curious interest has become a years-long endeavour to preserve the textiles and return them to China, where they originated, for study and display.

An encounter between collectors

One of Hall’s first purchases, nearly 50 years ago, was a Ming-dynasty Mandarin square, a large embroidered rank badge which was sewn onto the surcoat of officials in imperial China — and also in other forms for officials in Korea and Vietnam. He took it to a talk at the Helena May club by the late Valery Garrett, who was a fashion designer and had become an authority on Chinese textiles, particularly the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911).

Originating from Harrogate in the historic English county of Yorkshire, Garrett came to Hong Kong with her husband, Richard, in 1973, and worked as a designer for Hong Kong firm Dodwell & Co. In 1975, she was able to join their delegation to travel to the Canton Fair, which started a decades long love affair with Guangzhou. While professionally she joined the Hong Kong Polytechnic to help set up the Swire School of Design, in her spare time she researched the traditional clothing worn by villagers in the New Territories. She started collecting the clothes and would take an interpreter to interview the villagers. Alongside her design job, she began writing books about traditional Chinese clothing, including Chinese Dress: From the Qing Dynasty to the Present. Through their shared passion, she and Hall gradually became friends.  

“I mean, Valery would come and visit me and I would show her my new purchases,” he says. “I would visit her and see some of her new purchases. And there was one purchase I was very interested in. It was a badge with a very unusual animal. Valerie thought this might be the rhinoceros because it has a sort of horn. I don’t think so. I think it’s just one of these strange animals like pink zebras, that the Ming had,” says Hall.

Relics of the past

In his textiles room, Hall returns to his large sliding drawers to show some more items. At our request, he brings out children’s hats and shoes, including a set in the shape of a pig — an auspicious symbol in China. Then he shows us an exquisite bolt of silk cloth from the 14th century with animals and flowers intricately woven into the material. It could have been a part of a robe, says Hall, as he explains how the weaving technique has provided the same beautiful patterns and pictures on both sides of the bolt.

Hall got into the collecting game at the right time as China was beginning to open up after Mao Zedong’s rule. Many textiles had disappeared from the mainland. “Very little had survived,” says Hall. “Silk was plentiful in China, so the old silk was thrown away and replaced with the new. There was no prestige in keeping old silk.”

But there was one area where that wasn’t the case — Tibet, says Hall, where much of the silk items were kept, with some of them ending up in neighbouring Nepal and making their way to Hong Kong. Silk was also treasured in the Tibetan monasteries, says Hall, where items have been found that are hundreds of years old. 

Garrett largely bought it for academic research — she could photograph the clothes for her books. Hall bought for interest; only in the early years did he sell any of his acquisitions, as he gradually gained the expertise to see an inferior product. He doesn’t sell these days. For her part, Garrett sold her textiles collection through Linda Wrigglesworth, a renowned dealer in Chinese textiles, and Hall bought a number of items from her collection for around US$800,000.

“I learnt by seeing things,’” says Hall. “I became very interested and I’d go to dealers. I’d say I mainly learnt from dealers. I learnt a lot from Stephen McGuinness of Plum Blossoms.” 

McGuinness was the curator and founder of Plum Blossoms Gallery, which had branches in Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1990s. “His reputation is in modern Chinese painting but his love was in textiles. He was one of these Americans who ended up in Nepal and he was buying these pieces and then bringing them for sale and then he started a business doing it.”

In the 1980s, Hall also bought from renowned Hong Kong gallery owner and textiles specialist Teresa Coleman, who founded Teresa Coleman Fine Arts in 1982 and still continues more than 40 years on. 

An understudied subject

Chinese silk imperial robes from the Qing and Ming dynasties, and earlier, garner hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. But Chinese textiles remain an understudied subject. Hall is helping to change that. There are more studies by Chinese scholars these days, he says, and two mainland academics came to visit him last week. He has also donated earlier parts of his collection to museums on the mainland, including the Silk Museum in Hangzhou. Hangzhou has historically been a centre of silk-making in China with a number of silk workshops, and the silk heritage continues to today. 

“The Chinese collectors who can speak English are reaching out to me,” he says. “There was one Chinese rank badge collector who has written a book about Chinese rank badges which he asked me to write an introduction to, which I did. He’s been very helpful; I get advice from him as he knows more about rank badges than I do. The fact that I’ve agreed to give my collection to the Hong Kong Palace Museum means that the collection will stay in China.”

But the collection would not have been given without the museum also agreeing to take Hall’s apartment. He was quite insistent: no flat, no deal. He hopes the museum can use it for meetings, gatherings, hiring for events — a part of the Hong Kong landscape, and a heritage time capsule with its Harrods sofa and golden clock, gilt-framed oil portraits and metal crayfish and plenty of other gorgeousness.

The Chris Hall Collection: A History of China in Silk runs at the Hong Kong Palace Museum until 31 December 2025. Click here for more information.

Correction: An earlier version of this article contained typos in the photo captions. These have since been amended.