Rolf von Bueren first came to India in 1964, and his first buy was a jamevar shawl from Kolkata. Since then, he has been visiting the country three to four times a year to work with the craftsmen and source textiles. This time around, he has come armed with a few Sanskrit words. “I have been asking people what they mean, and I haven’t got an answer,” says the genteel octogenarian. “In Thailand, many people would know that some of these words mean. In Thailand, all royal ceremonies start with Brahmin priests reciting the prayers, then come the Buddhist ones. Even the written Thai language is closer to Sanskrit than Hindi is.”

Born German, Rolf has done “a lifetime of meditation and other exercises” to shed “the aggression of the West”. “The Thai are very gentle people,” he says of his adoptive country. Looking at that high forehead, soft speech and deep bow during introductions and farewells, it’s hard to imagine him as anything other than a connoisseur of fine things. Yet he was sent to Thailand in 1962 to set up a chemical plant. “Then I was sent to Korea,” he says, “but the country was too hard; no judgment.”