This city’s ambitious young art scene acquired another multimillion-dollar feather in its cap on Tuesday.

Uli Sigg, the world’s leading collector of contemporary Chinese art, announced at a news conference that he was donating 1,463 works from the early 1990s to the present day to M+, a museum that is expected to open in 2017. Sotheby’s estimated the gift’s worth at 1.3 billion Hong Kong dollars, or about $165 million.

M+ will be part of the West Kowloon Cultural District, a government project that is expected to cost 21.6 billion dollars. The proposed arts districthas been in the planning stages for almost 15 years, though construction has not yet begun.

Mr. Sigg’s donation encompasses works by 310 artists, though the one artist that Hong Kong reporters asked about on Tuesday was Ai Weiwei, who will be represented by 26 works. Mr. Ai, a dissident who was detained for several months in Beijing last year, is considered controversial in mainland China.

While Mr. Sigg declined to comment on Mr. Ai’s case, he said he had chosen Hong Kong for its freedoms and its proximity to mainland audiences.

“I’d had a number of exchanges with mainland institutions,” said Mr. Sigg, who was the Swiss ambassador to China in the 1990s. “My first impulse was to think of the mainland. But the conditions are not such that art could be shown without limitations.”

Mr. Sigg said he wanted to give his collection to a fledging Hong Kong project instead of an established Western museum.

“It’s very important that a Chinese public have access to these works,” he said. “The Chinese public ought to see its own contemporary art, which it doesn’t know yet.”

M+ on Tuesday also announced a purchase from the Sigg collection: 47 Chinese works from the 1970s and ’80s for 177 million dollars.

In a statement, the authority that controls the West Kowloon project said. “Part gift/part purchase is an increasingly common international model for museums to obtain collections.”

The Sigg collection marked M+’s first donation and its first purchase, representing about 17 percent of its acquisitions budget of 1 billion dollars.

It was only earlier Tuesday that the authority set up a collection trust and solidified its policies on acquisitions and donations.

Aside from filling M+’s bare cupboard, the Sigg collection gives it the cachet it needs to engage in the exchanges and loans that link the world’s arts institutions.

Lars Nittve, M+’s executive director, said he was already in discussions with overseas museums, which might show some of the artworks before the 2017 Hong Kong opening.

“This is historical for art history, and historical for museum history,” said Mr. Nittve, who is tasked with building the museum’s collection. “M+ now has a collection of Chinese art that nobody will be able to get their hands on.”

Mr. Sigg, who first moved to China as a businessman in 1979, began visiting artists’ studios after work and built up his collection with his wife.

“It is an emotional moment,” he said. “It is both a privilege and a burden to have such a collection.”

Speaking after the news conference, he added, “I will miss it very much.”