Approximately 150 years ago, famine drove many people from northwestern India to Bombay, among them a merchant from Kutch in Gujarat named Khetsee and his son Devjee, leaving their families behind.  There, they joined others from Kutch in the rice trade, sleeping first in the warehouses near the port, taking whatever jobs they could, until in 1868 two of Devjee's sons established an office in Rangoon.  Named for the two men, Gangjee and Premjee, the company opened an office in Bangkok in 1918, moving its main operations to the Thai capital in 1964 when military dictators in Burma nationalized all foreign firms.

For the first hundred years or so, the Gangjee-Premjee Company traded only rice, sourced in Burma, Vietnam and Thailand and sold mainly to the Middle East and Africa.  Premjee's son Chimanlal was the only non-Chinese rice trader in Bangkok, gaining an advantage in those countries because the traders spoke English and often some Indian languages, where the Sino-Thais spoke only Thai and a Chinese dialect.

When the family adopted a surname, "Shah"---a Gujarati word meaning "merchant" or "trader"---it led to Chimanlal's becoming widely known as "The Shah of Bangkok" for his open house policy for the local Indian community and overall hospitality.   In 1976, he was joined by his only son Kirit, who at age of 22 was told by his father to circumnavigate the world to meet present and future customers.  When he returned, he said there was a market out there for a wide variety of other commodities. 

Chimanlal suffered a stroke in 1979, by which time Kirit was trading other grains and within a few years he was adding as many as 10 new products a month, from coal and steel to cooking oil and tinned fruit and fish.  He also added a bell in the office, telling his traders---many of them recruited from India's top graduate educational institutes---they could ring it once for every 1,000 tons of product sold; sometimes, he said, it rang for half an hour at a time.

In the 1980s, Kirit started forming new companies, including the first Thai company to manufacture raw pharmaceutical chemicals and a factory that soon was producing five per cent of the world's condoms.  He also started the Precious Shipping Line (PSL), a fleet of dry bulk freighters and one of the first Indian-owned companies to be listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand.

As Thailand's economy boomed in that decade and into the 1990s, what was now called G Premjee added real estate and construction to its portfolio, building numerous highrise residential estates and the Amari Atrium Hotel.  Joint ventures in several countries offered everything from diamond importation and jewelry design to bank cards to travel to information technology.  By 1996, G Premjee owned or had interests in 154 different companies and its slogan was "Enterprise Without Frontiers." 

"If it was worth trading," he told the Bangkok Post, "it was worth trying." 
And then the Thai currency was devalued and the so-called "Asian crisis" hit, in 1997.  Many of the G Premjee companies were sold.  Offices on four continents were closed.  With bank credit no longer available, the main trading company, based in Singapore, filed for bankruptcy and all commodity trading ceased.  When Forbes Asia magazine asked him how much in dollar loans did he have in 1997, Kirit said, "Billions."  And how much did he lose?  "Billions."

Recovery was slow at first, then accelerated rapidly as all debts were paid and shipping rates rose with increased trading worldwide.  PSL was now a chartering company and the enormous growth in development---notably in China, India and the Middle East---as well as expanding global consumer spending pushed the shipping line's vessel count to 44 (with another 18 on order), making it Thailand's second largest shipping line, its financial performance ranked No. 1 internationally by prestigious Marine Money magazine (in 2006).

GP began trading again, importing environmentally friendly coal from Indonesia for sale in Thailand, mining limestone and manufacturing aluminum (from recycled scrap) for export to India.  A small company that produced soft gelatin capsules for the medical trade---the first company Kirit formed in the 1980s---was now marketing close to a hundred pharmaceuticals and nutritional supplements in 25 emerging countries from Kazakhstan to Vietnam, from Burma to Nigeria, under the name Mega LifeSciences.  GP also became Thailand's exclusive agent for India's premier air carrier, Jet Airways; formed a charter executive jet service with Bill Heinecke, head of Thailand's Minor Group; and in 2008, launched a line of leisure wear branded Nsha, a slightly abbreviated Sanskrit word that means "intoxicated," while evoking the name of Kirit's oldest daughter, Nishita Shah, who had joined the company following her education in the United States.

Once upon a time, Kirit's position---in sync with Indian businessmen everywhere---was "a low profile never hurt anyone."  Today, his first-born, Nishita, is taking the company public, determined to make the GP logo known worldwide as well as make some of its new brands internationally recognized.  It didn't hurt when Forbes Asia named her No. 12 in its list of richest Thais in 2007, and as a result she soon became the media's cover girl of choice, featured in dozens of periodicals, from Hello! to USA Today.

"I'm not shy," Kirit told Forbes.  "There was just no need to publicize anything.  But this is the new generation.  They think you need to be exposed.  It might bring about new opportunities."