Liem Seeng Tee arrived in Java from China's Fujian province in 1898 with nothing. He saved enough to buy a secondhand bicycle, which he rode around Surabaya selling charcoal. By 1913, he and his wife had scraped together enough to begin buying tobacco from local traders, experimenting with blends that mixed robust leaf with aromatic cloves and spices. The result was kretek -- the distinctive clove cigarette that crackles when smoked, named for the popping sound the cloves make as they burn. Liem launched his first brand, Dji Sam Soe, whose name derives from the Hokkien dialect meaning "two-three-four," a reference to the precise proportions in his closely guarded formula. The cigarettes sold fast. When success finally came in the 1930s, Liem changed his surname to Sampoerna -- an Indonesian word meaning "perfection." It was the kind of name a man chooses after a lifetime of proving he deserved it.

The compound Liem purchased in 1932 was no ordinary factory site. Built in 1862 as a Dutch colonial orphanage, it featured a grand central auditorium flanked by two smaller buildings, with rows of single-story warehouse structures behind. Liem converted the side buildings into family residences and transformed the open warehouses into processing floors for every stage of kretek production: tobacco curing, clove blending, hand-rolling, packaging, and printing. The family lived where they worked, and the compound became a self-contained world of commerce and domesticity. For Sampoerna's 90th anniversary in 2003, the family restored the central auditorium into a museum. The eastern wing became a cafe and art gallery. The western building remains the family residence. A 1972 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, once used by the Sampoerna family, sits parked beside the main entrance -- an artifact of the wealth that cloves and tobacco built.

What makes the House of Sampoerna unusual among museums is that it is still alive. The upper floors remain a working factory where more than 400 women hand-roll kretek cigarettes daily. Visitors can watch them through observation windows, each worker deftly shaping the tobacco-and-clove blend into tight cylinders with a speed that borders on mechanical. Photography is forbidden on the production floor, which only adds to the mystique. These hand-rolled kretek occupy a complicated place in Indonesian culture -- cherished as artisanal tradition, criticized as a health crisis, and economically vital to the thousands of families whose livelihoods depend on the rolling tables. In 2005, Philip Morris International acquired nearly 98 percent of Sampoerna, folding the family dynasty into the world's largest tobacco corporation. The hand-rolling continues, but the empire Liem built now belongs to different hands.

The House of Sampoerna also serves as a gateway to the city's colonial past through the Surabaya Heritage Track, a sightseeing program that departs from the museum. Passengers board a bus modeled after the tramcars that once rattled through Surabaya's streets, winding through the old port district known as North Surabaya or "Old Surabaya." The route passes Dutch-era warehouses, Chinese shophouses, and the remnants of a trading city that once rivaled Batavia in commercial importance. Surabaya has never polished its colonial architecture for tourists the way Jakarta or Yogyakarta have. Buildings decay where maintenance cannot reach, and commerce fills the structures that survive. The Heritage Track offers a curated glimpse into this layered history -- the "Babad Surabaya" traditional chronicles, the multicultural trading networks, and the architectural evidence of a port city that has reinvented itself repeatedly over centuries.