Entrepreneur Finds a Home for Collection of Rare Chinese Artifacts

A Chinese entrepreneur who immigrated to California at age 5 and amassed a fortune in the high-technology

industry, Roland Tseng, has taken great pleasure in returning frequently to his native country to collect antique artworks and artifacts, some dating from the Stone Age.

Last year, Mr. Tseng felt an equal degree of satisfaction when he pledged to donate much of that collection, worth some $38-million, to California State University at Northridge. The gift, to be distributed over four years, includes dozens of rare objects as well as funds to study and preserve them.

The Tseng Family Collection will be displayed in the university’s C.K. and Teresa Tseng Gallery, renamed in honor of Mr. Tseng’s parents, who run a travel agency in the San Fernando Valley near the Northridge campus. Roland Tseng attended the university briefly himself before collecting bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Pepperdine University, and his family has long had ties to Northridge.

$5.5-Million Ritual Vessel

The first installment of Mr. Tseng’s gift includes a ritual vessel of gold, bronze, and jade estimated to be more than 3,000 years old and worth about $5.5-million. Other gifts include a bronze bull with gold and silver inlay and a glass water buffalo, both more than 2,000 years old, and a stone ax blade estimated to be more than 1.5 million years old. The eight objects are valued at $9.5-million.

Jolene Koester, the university’s president, calls Mr. Tseng’s gift “the cornerstone of a large university effort” to raise its profile on Southern California’s cultural map. The objects, she says, will attract scholars from the university departments of archaeology, art, Asian studies, geology, history, and material sciences, as well as researchers from other institutions.

The university has longstanding ties to China, Ms. Koester notes, dating to academic exchanges in 1978-79, when the United States and China resumed normal diplomatic relations. The university now has academic-exchange agreements with nearly 40 Chinese educational and government institutions, and was host to nearly 100 visiting scholars from China in the previous academic year.

Mr. Tseng’s own ties to his native country are strong and diverse.

Since starting his career in his family’s travel agency in the early 1980s, he has traveled to China more than 100 times. In 1985, Mr. Tseng founded China Media Services, which introduced American television programming to mass audiences in China. He advised the U.S. Commerce Department during its bilateral tourism talks with China in 1987, and was country director for the United Nations’ Hunger Project in China from 1988 to 2000. He has been collecting Chinese antiquities for two decades.

Mr. Tseng’s business career has been equally protean. A company he founded in 1999, called Cyperion, developed security software technology that uses biometric data (like fingerprints) to secure information over the Internet. His current company, Native Software, has developed a way to link Global Positioning System technology with video recording to document archaeological sites and for other mapping and surveying purposes.

Mr. Tseng, 48, holds a fifth-degree black belt in Kenpo karate, and has published several books, including one in 1983 called Thirty Days to Aerobic Self-Defense that spawned a related instructional video.

As part of the terms of the gift, the university is now renovating the special collections area of its Oviatt Library to accommodate the artworks and keep them both accessible and secure. It plans to mount an exhibit in April of more than 100 objects, including those donated and lent by Mr. Tseng.

“I have always considered myself as a caretaker of these priceless antiquities,” Mr. Tseng observes, “and now I’ve found a home for them.”