Tjie Tjin Hoan was born on 24 August 1931 in the town of Parigi in Central Sulawesi, Dutch East Indies. He was the third child of Chinese Indonesian merchants Tjie Sim Poe (徐沈步) and Lie Eng Nio (李英娘) whose ancestral home was in Zhangzhou, Fujian. After Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies during World War II, Tjie’s father was falsely accused of being a Dutch spy and arrested by the Japanese in 1943. Tjie never learned for sure what happened to his father, who was never heard from again and presumed to have died in prison.

Fatherless at age 12, Tjie grew up in poverty, but was able to resume his education after the end of World War II. After finishing high school in Manado, he entered the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology in Java to study architecture. He graduated in 1960.

Ciputra was known as one of Indonesia’s most generous philanthropists. Attributing his self-made success to his education, he established ten schools as well as the Ciputra University of Entrepreneurship in Surabaya. An avid art collector, in 2014 he opened the Ciputra Artpreneur Museum in Jakarta, which holds a large collection of works by his favourite artist, Hendra Gunawan.

The Ciputra Group has three subsidiaries listed on the Jakarta Stock Exchange: Ciputra Development, Ciputra Surya, and Ciputra Property. Ciputra Development is one of Indonesia’s largest listed property companies. In 2018, Ciputra was ranked by Forbes as the 27th richest person in Indonesia, with an estimated net worth of US$1.2 billion.

On 27 November 2019, Ciputra died at age 88 at Gleneagles Hospital in Singapore, where he had been undergoing treatment for an illness.

He was buried in a private cemetery at Jonggol, West Java on December 5 2019.