But the family did not fade into Thai society and culture. Rather it became part of the distinctively hybrid Thai-Chinese lukchin culture which developed in twentieth-century Siam. In Pioneers of Chiang Mai and other biographies, the wives of Seng and Chiang are portrayed as working alongside their husbands with the same motivation and aptitude for commerce as a Chinese immigrantthey become honorary lukchin as much as or more than the men "become Thai From Chiang's generation onwards, the family built connections with other rising Chinese-origin commercial families in Chiang Mai. Chiang's elder sister Muisian married into a branch of the Chutima family which had risen on the riverine trade down the Ping River and become one of the city's most eminent dynasties. Muisian's daughter married into the Osothaphan clan, which owned rice mills and saw mills. Her granddaughter married Thawat Tantranont who built the city's first department store (Tantraphan). In the next generation, Khemthong married Chu osothaphan of the same rice and timber family, and Sujet married into the Phromchana family, owners of rice land, orchard a school, and later property developments around Sankamphaeng By the 1950s, the Shinawatra were established as one of the premier commercial families of Chiang Mai (Prani 1980, 182-6).