This is the story of Liem Sioe Liong, a penniless migrant from China who arrived in Java in 1938 and became the wealthiest businessman in Suharto’s Indonesia. Through serendipity, good instincts and networking skills, Liem rose from being an obscure, small-scale trader in the 1950s to become an important pillar of support for Suharto, who gained power amid murky circumstances and replaced Sukarno as Indonesia’s president in the mid-1960s.

The text has elusive inputs from Liem and his son Anthony Salim, currently CEO of the giant conglomerate Liem founded, known as the Salim Group. It traces the history of the group from its birth in the late 1960s, to its development as a transnational corporation, until the post-Suharto period, when Anthony fended off opponents and kept Salim afloat after its patron lost power in 1998.