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Bengkulu (at this time known as Bencoolen), a city on the west coast of Sumatra, had fallen under control of the British East India Company during the seventeenth century.

The company had built a fortress, Fort Marlborough, and began to govern the region.

In 1805, Thomas Parr was appointed Resident of Bencoolen.

The contemporary British described Parr as "a benevolent Father" to the Malay residents of Bengkulu, while Indonesian sources describe him as a man of cruelty who introduced the forced agriculture of coffee to the region.

During a rebellion against his rule, Parr and his aide Charles Murray are killed on December 27, 1807, when three men enter his home, Mount Felix, stabbing and decapitating Parr and dealing fatal wounds to Murray.

The British quash the rebellion, and the East India Company will build a monument to Parr the following year.

Though built as a memorial to Parr and his death, the people of Bengkulu will reinterpret the monument as a testament to their refusal to accept colonialism and their defense of their land and rights.

The monument is today a cultural property of Indonesia

The British had begun to expand their commerce with China from their bases in India through both private traders and the British East India Company in the late eighteenth century.

The company has occupied a small settlement at Bencoolen (Bengkulu) on the western coast of Sumatra since 1684; from there it had engaged in the pepper trade after being forced out of Java by the Dutch.

Acutely aware of the need for a base somewhere midway between Calcutta and Guangzhou (Canton), the company had leased the island of Penang, on the western coast of the Malay Peninsula, from the sultan of Kedah in 1791.

From these posts at Penang and Bencoolen, the British had begun in 1795 to occupy the Dutch possessions placed temporarily in their care by the Kew Letters, including Malacca and Java.

After war in Europe ended in 1814, however, the British had agreed to return Java and Malacca to the Dutch.

By 1818 the Dutch have returned to the East Indies and had reimposed their restrictive trade policies.

In that same year, the Dutch negotiated a treaty with the Bugis-controlled sultan of Johore granting them permission to station a garrison at Riau, thereby giving them control over the main passage through the Strait of Malacca.

British trading ships are heavily taxed at Dutch ports and suffer harassment by the Dutch navy.

Meanwhile, the British government and the British East India Company officials in London, who are concerned with maintaining peace with the Dutch, consolidating British control in India, and reducing their commitments in the East Indies, consider relinquishing Bencoolen and perhaps Penang to the Dutch in exchange for Dutch territories in India.

The 1833 Sumatra earthquake, occurring on November 25 at about 22:00 local time, with an estimated magnitude in the range of 8.8–9.2 Mw, causes a large tsunami that floods the southwestern coast of the island.

There are no reliable records of the loss of life, with the casualties being described only as 'numerous'.

The magnitude of this event has been estimated using records of uplift taken from coral microatolls.

The earthquake shaking lasts five minutes in Bengkulu and three minutes in Padang; combined with the severity this suggests a very large source rupture.

Modelling of the tsunami suggests that most of the energy would have been radiated out into the Indian Ocean, sparing most coastal population centers outside Sumatra itself.