Some jewellery collections are designed around a stone. Others around a wearer. The Legacy® Fan Series, the upcoming launch from Poh Heng's heritage line, is designed around a meeting of cultures. The collection takes the precision of Japanese origami, the cultural depth of the Peranakan tradition, and the gold craft of Singapore's longest-standing jewellers, and folds them into a single design language built on one shape: the fan.
This is the story of how that came together, why the fan was the right starting point, and what the Fan Series represents for the future of Singapore fine jewellery.
The Fan: An Object with Multiple Cultural Livess
The fan is one of the few design objects that carries serious cultural weight across multiple Asian traditions. It is not a borrowed motif transplanted from one culture into another. It is something each of these cultures has lived with on its own terms, for centuries, before any of them met.
In Chinese tradition, the fan (扇 shàn) has been an object of refinement, scholarship, and status for over three thousand years. Court officials carried fans. Poets painted on fans. Brides received fans as wedding gifts. The fan was both functional and symbolic, and a well-made fan could be a statement of cultivation as serious as any piece of jewellery.
In Japanese tradition, the fan took a different path. It became the centre of an entire craft discipline through origami, the art of folded paper, where mathematical precision and aesthetic restraint combined into a uniquely Japanese design philosophy. Origami is not really about paper. It is about the structural intelligence of the fold, the way a single piece of material can be transformed into something layered, dimensional, and complete.
In the Peranakan tradition, the fan arrived as part of formal Nyonya dress, an accessory carried at family gatherings, weddings, and ceremonial occasions. The Peranakans absorbed the Chinese symbolic meanings of the fan and added their own layer of cross-cultural expression, the same way they had absorbed and reinterpreted other elements of their Chinese, Malay, and European cultural inheritance.
Three traditions. Three relationships with one shape. The Legacy® Fan Series begins where these traditions overlap.
Why the Fan
The decision to anchor a new collection on the fan motif was not arbitrary. Several considerations came together.
Cultural depth without cultural confinement. Peranakan jewellery is rich in motifs, but many of them are tightly bound to specific occasions or specific communities. The peony reads as wedding. The phoenix reads as bridal. The fan is different. It carries cultural meaning in Chinese, Japanese, and Peranakan traditions, and it works as everyday wear as easily as ceremonial wear. It opens the collection up to a wider audience without losing the cultural specificity that defines Peranakan fine jewellery.
Design language that translates cleanly to metal. Origami offers something most jewellery motifs do not: a structural design vocabulary. The fold, the pleat, the radial geometry of a fan opening. These are translatable into gold in a way that few flat-pattern motifs are. The Legacy® Fan Series uses this structural quality to give each piece a sense of dimensional movement that goes beyond surface decoration.
A motif that grows with the collection. A fan-anchored collection has room to evolve. The fan can be rendered minimally as a clean silhouette pendant. It can be elaborated as a gem-set statement piece. It can hold pearls, sapphires, lapis lazuli, mother of pearl, each stone bringing its own cultural and aesthetic resonance to the same underlying shape. The Fan Series is not a single design. It is a design language that the Legacy® line can build on for years to come.
The Pieces of the Fan Series
The Legacy® Fan Series launches with a coordinated range across pendants, earrings, and rings, featuring four hero gemstones.
Lapis Lazuli pieces. Set in 18K gold, the Lapis Lazuli Fan pieces use one of the world's oldest decorative stones, prized for its deep blue colour and historic association with refinement and scholarship. Lapis lazuli appears in Egyptian, Chinese, and Persian decorative traditions going back millennia, which gives these pieces a layer of universal heritage alongside their Peranakan specificity.
Golden South Sea Pearl pieces. The Golden South Sea pearl, sourced from Japan and graded by size and colour, sits at the heart of the most distinctive pieces in the range. The pearl appears in pendant, earring, and ring forms, each piece designed to let the pearl's natural lustre carry the visual centre while the fan motif provides the structural surround. South Sea pearls have particular weight in Peranakan tradition as both heritage stones and modern fine jewellery centrepieces.
Yellow Sapphire pieces. Set in 18K yellow and white gold, the Yellow Sapphire Fan pieces bring a stone that carries Vedic auspiciousness, contemporary fashion currency, and a colour that complements high-purity gold without competing with it. Yellow sapphire is gaining momentum in modern Singapore fine jewellery and the Fan Series places these pieces within the broader heritage context.
Mother of Pearl pieces. Set in 18K rose gold, the Mother of Pearl Fan pieces use a centuries-old decorative material that connects directly to the Peranakan craft tradition. Mother of pearl appears in Peranakan furniture inlay, in jewellery, and in decorative arts going back generations. The rose-gold setting brings the pieces into contemporary wearability while preserving the cultural reference.
Each piece is hallmarked by the Singapore Assay Office under Singapore Standard SS581:2020. The full Legacy® Fan Series will be available at the Legacy® collection page from launch.
What This Collection Represents
The Legacy® Fan Series is the first major design statement from Poh Heng's heritage line in the current era of the brand's evolution. It sits within a longer story.
Poh Heng has been a Singapore goldsmith continuously since 1948, now in the third generation of family ownership. The Legacy® line is the brand's dedicated heritage collection, the bridge between the brand's deepest cultural roots and the contemporary Singapore fine jewellery audience. Within Legacy®, the Fan Series represents a deliberate step into the kind of cross-cultural design thinking that has always been part of Peranakan tradition but has rarely been articulated this clearly in a modern fine jewellery collection.
It is also a recognition that Singapore fine jewellery has the cultural confidence to draw from multiple Asian traditions at once. The Fan Series does not pretend to be purely Chinese, purely Japanese, or purely Peranakan. It is genuinely all three, in a way that reflects how Singapore itself has always been cross-cultural.
Designed to Be Worn, Not Stored
One last note on design intent. The Legacy® Fan Series is not built as ceremonial-only jewellery. The pieces are designed to be worn through daily life, paired equally with contemporary dress and traditional dress, suited to office wear and to occasion wear, scaled for casual elegance as much as formal statement.
That is the practical expression of the philosophy behind the collection: heritage is not something you take out of a box for special occasions. It is something you live with.
Explore the Legacy® collection →
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