I must admit, I was a bit taken aback to find that a "cigarette museum" was on the list of places my guide wanted to show me in Surabaya. I'm not a smoker and I don't like being around it, but the guide assured me I would like the museum so I went along for the ride.

Despite its common name, the House of Sampoerna Museum as it's properly called is actually devoted almost entirely to the history of Sampoerna, one of Indonesia's largest companies and of course primarily involved in the production of cigarettes. It's a classic "rags to riches" story revolving around the company's founder Liem Seeng Tee. The orphan Tee started out selling snacks on trains as a young boy. After saving up enough money for a bicycle, he used it to go into the charcoal business. Eventually he founded Sampoerna, which was recently purchased by international tobacco giant Philip Morris for a staggering 5.2 Billion dollars.