When 23-year-old Shih Chin-tay boarded a plane for the United States in the summer of 1969, he was flying to a different world.

He grew up in a fishing village surrounded by sugarcane fields. He had attended university in Taiwan’s capital Taipei, then a city of dusty streets and grey apartment buildings where people rarely owned cars.

Now he was off to Princeton University. The US had just a put a man on the Moon and the Boeing 747 in the skies. Its economy was larger than those of the Soviet Union, Japan, Germany and France combined.

“When I landed, I was shocked,” Dr Shih, now 77, says. “I thought to myself: Taiwan is so poor, I must do something to try and help make it better off.”