Edmond Chin, the designer behind Hong Kong’s Etcetera collection, came to jewelry not through art school or family but through history— specifically, the history of the Straits Chinese, the descendants of the earliest Chinese immigrants to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Owl brooch

The Peranakans, as they are also known, fused Chinese and Malay traditions to create distinctive 22-karat gold jewels that captured the Singaporean-born Chin’s attention when he began collecting them at age 14. By the time he graduated from Oxford, he’d assembled enough to outfit a museum. Two years in the making, his definitive exhibition, “Gilding the Phoenix: The Straits Chinese and Their Jewellery,” was held at Singapore’s National Museum in 1991. The experience opened the door to a job in the jadeite department at Christie’s in Hong Kong.

“Then I had an extraordinary string of good luck,” Chin says on a balmy morning at his office in the Central district of Hong Kong. He wears an argyle hoodie, funky dark-rimmed glasses and earrings, making him look considerably younger than his 43 years. “Let me tell you about the second half of my life.” He disappears behind a mirrored closet door and returns with an old Christie’s catalog. He points to a photo of a single piece of green jade, a disc known as a Huaigu necklace that he commissioned Bulgari to create for the 1994 sale. “It made HK$4.5 million ($577,000) against an estimate of HK$1.8 million ($231,000),” he says.

Pearl earrings

Spurred by similar successes, Chin struck out on his own in 2000, quickly earning a reputation as a daring designer with the chutzpah to combine unusual materials with serious stones—like a pair of earrings he recently made using Victorian tortoiseshell bought on London’s Portobello Road and embellished with yellow and orange diamonds. “I call them my ’60s go-go earrings,” he says. “I love combining old and new.”

Chin’s business is split between wholesale (sold at BaselWorld under the name Lançon) and private clients, but the latter are the beneficiaries of his finest work. “You want to see five years of matching?” he asks before producing a case of 10 diamonds in varying shades of green; eventually they will comprise a bracelet surrounded by two rows of green diamond melee. “If you want the best, you have to wait,” Chin says. “Making a great piece of jewelry is like that.”