Singapore businessmen have considerable interest in the…

Singapore businessmen have considerable interest in the rubber, tin, gambier, and other products and resources of the Malay Peninsula by the 1870s.

Conditions in the peninsula are highly unstable, however, marked by fighting between immigrants and traditional Malay authorities and rivalry among various Chinese secret societies.

Singapore serves as an entrepot for the resources of the Malay Peninsula and, at the same time, the port of debarkation for thousands of immigrant Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, and Malays bound for the tin mines and rubber plantations to the north.

Some two hundred and fifty thousand Chinese alone will disembark in Singapore in 1912, most of them on their way to the Malay states or to the Dutch East Indies.