Piracy, probably the most serious problem facing Singapore at mid-century, is  practiced by a number of groups who find easy pickings in the waters around the thriving port.

Some of the followers of the temenggong's son and heir, Ibrahim, were still engaging in their "patrolling" activities in the late 1830s.

Most dangerous of the various pirate groups, however, are the Illanun (Lanun) of Mindanao in the Philippines and northern Borneo.

These fierce sea raiders send out annual fleets of fifty to one hundred well-armed prahu, which raid settlements, attack ships, and carry off prisoners who are pressed into service as oarsmen.

The Illanun attack not only small craft from the archipelago but also Chinese and European sailing ships.

Bugis trading captains threatened to quit trading at Singapore unless the piracy is stopped.

Trade at Singapore had eclipsed that of Penang by 1824, when it reached a total of Sp$1 million annually. By 1869 annual trade at Singapore had risen to Sp$89 million.

The cornerstone of the settlement's commercial success is the entrepot trade, which is carried on with no taxation and a minimum of restriction.

The main trading season begins each year with the arrival of ships from China, Siam, and Cochinchina.

Driven by the northeast monsoon winds and arriving in January, February, and March, the ships bring immigrant laborers and cargoes of dried and salted foods, medicines, silk, tea, porcelain, and pottery.

They leave beginning in May with the onset of the southwest monsoons, laden with produce, spices, tin, and gold from the Malay Archipelago, opium from India, and English cotton goods and arms.

The second major trading season begins in September or October with the arrival of the Bugis traders in their small, swift prahu, bringing rice, pepper, spices, edible bird nests and shark fins, mother-of-pearl, gold dust, rattan, and camphor from the archipelago.

They depart carrying British manufactures, cotton goods, iron, arms, opium, salt, silk, and porcelain.

By mid-century, there are more than twenty British merchant houses in Singapore, as well as German, Swiss, Dutch, Portuguese, and French firms.

The merchants receive cargoes of European or Indian goods on consignment and sell them on commission.

Most of the trade between the European and Asian merchants is handled by Chinese middlemen, who speak the necessary languages and know the needs of their customers.

Many of the middlemen had trained as clerks in the European trading firms of Malacca.

With their experience, contacts, business acumen, and willingness to take risks, the middlemen are indispensable to the merchants.

For the Chinese middlemen, the opportunities for substantial profit are great; but so are the risks.

Lacking capital, the middlemen buy large quantities of European goods on credit with the hope of reselling them to the Chinese or Bugis ship captains or themselves arranging to ship them to the markets of Siam or the eastern Malay Peninsula.

If, however, buyers cannot be found or ships are lost at sea, the middlemen face bankruptcy or prison.

Although the merchants also stand to lose under such circumstances, the advantages of the system and the profits to be made keep it flourishing.

The main site for mercantile activity in mid-century Singapore is Commercial Square, which will be renamed Raffles Place in 1858.

Besides the European merchant houses located on the square, there are in 1846 six Jewish merchant houses, five Chinese, five Arab, two Armenian, one American, and one Indian.

Each merchant house has its own pier for loading and unloading cargo; and ship chandlers, banks, auction houses, and other businesses serving the shipping trade also are located on the square.

In the early years, merchants lived above their offices; but by mid-century most have established themselves in beautiful houses and compounds in a fashionable section on the east bank of the Singapore River.

Construction of government buildings lags far behind commercial buildings in the early years because of the lack of tax-generated revenue.

The merchants resist any attempts by Calcutta to levy duties on trade, and the British East India Company had little interest in increasing the colony's budget.

Since 1833, however, many public works projects have been constructed by the extensive use of Indian convict labor.

Irish architect George Drumgold Coleman, who had been appointed superintendent of public works in that year, uses convicts to drain marshes, reclaim seafront, lay out roads, and build government buildings, churches, and homes in a graceful colonial style.

Cambodia, in the view of the government in Paris, is a promising backwater.

Persuaded by a missionary envoy to seek French protection against both the Thai and the Vietnamese, King Ang Duong invites a French diplomatic mission to visit his court.

The Thai, however, pressure him to refuse to meet with the French when they finally arrive at Odongk in 1856.

The much-publicized travels of the naturalist Henri Mouhot, who visits the Cambodian court, rediscoversthe ruins at Angkor, and journeys up the Mekong River to the Laotian kingdom of Luang Prabang from 1859 to 1861, piques French interest in the kingdom's alleged vast riches and in the value of the Mekong as a gateway to China's southwestern provinces.

In August 1863, the French conclude a treaty with Ang Duong's successor, Norodom (1859-1904).

This agreement affords the Cambodian monarch French protection (in the form of a French official called a resident) in exchange for giving the French rights to explore and to exploit the kingdom's mineral and forest resources.

France's interest in Indochina in the nineteenth century grows out of its rivalry with Britain, which has excluded it from India and has effectively shut it out of other pans of mainland Southeast Asia.

The French also desire to establish commerce in a region that promises so much untapped wealth and to redress the Vietnamese state's persecution of Catholic converts, whose welfare is a stated aim of French overseas policy.

The Nguyen dynasty's repeated refusal to establish diplomatic relations and the violently anti-Christian policies of the emperors Minh Mang (1820-41), Thieu Tri (1841-47). and Tu Duc (1848-83) impel the French to engage in gunboat diplomacy that results, in 1862, in the establishment of French dominion over Saigon and over the three eastern provinces of the Cochinchina (Mekong Delta) region.

Most Chinese men in Singapore, to help them face the dangers, hardships, and loneliness of the sojourner life, join or are forced to join secret societies organized by earlier immigrants from their home districts.

The secret societies have their origin in southern China, where, in the late seventeenth century, the Heaven, Earth, and Man (or Triad) Society had been formed to oppose the Qing (1644-1911) dynasty.

By the nineteenth century, secret societies in China acta as groups that organize urban unskilled labor and use coercion to win control of economic niches, such as unloading ships, transporting cotton, or gambling and prostitution.

The same pattern extends all over Southeast Asia, where immigrants join secret societies whose membership is restricted to those coming from the same area and speaking the same dialect.

Membership gives the immigrants some security, in the form of guaranteed employment and assistance in case of illness, but required loyalty to the leaders and payment of a portion of an already meager wage.

Although the societies perform many useful social functions, they are also a major source of crime and violence.

By 1860 there are at least twelve secret societies in Singapore, representing the various dialect and sub-dialect groups.

Invariably friction arises as each society seeks to control a certain area or the right to a certain tax farm.

Civil war in China in the 1850s brings a flood of new migrants from China, including many rebels and other violent elements.

Serious fighting between the various secret societies breaks out in 1854, but it remains a domestic dispute within the Chinese community.

Although not directed at the government or the non-Chinese communities, such outbreaks disrupt commerce and create a tense atmosphere, which will lead to the banning of secret societies in 1889.

The size and diversity of Singapore's population keeps pace as it prospers and grows.

By 1827, the Chinese had become the most numerous of Singapore's various ethnic groups.

Many of the Chinese had come from Malacca, Penang, Riau, and other parts of the Malay Archipelago to which their forebears had migrated decades or even generations before.

More recent Chinese immigrants are mainly from the southeastern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian and speak either the Hokkien, Teochiu, Cantonese, or Hakka dialects.

In an extension of the common Chinese practice of sojourning, in which men temporarily leave their home communities to seek work in nearby or distant cities, most migrants to Singapore see themselves as temporary residents intending to return to home and family after making a fortune or at least amassing enough capital to buy land in their home district.

Many do return; more do not.

Even those who never return usually send remittances to families back home.

Singapore's development and prosperity at mid-century are largely confined to the coast within a few kilometers of the port area.

The interior remains a dense jungle ringed by a coastline of mangrove swamps.

Attempts to turn the island to plantation agriculture between 1830 and 1840 had met with little success.

Nutmeg, coffee, sugar, cotton, cinnamon, cloves, and indigo had all fallen victim to pests, plant diseases, or insufficient soil fertility.

The only successful agricultural enterprises were the gambier and pepper plantations, numbering about x hundred in the late 1840s and employng some six thousand Chinese laborers.

When the firewood needed to extract the gambier became depleted, the plantation would be moved to a new area.

As a result, the forests of much of the interior of the island haa been destroyed and replaced by coarse grasses by the 1860s, and the gambier planters have moved their operations north to Johor.

This pressure on the land had also affected the habitats of the wildlife, particularly tigers, which began increasingly to attack villagers and plantation workers.

Tigers reportedly claimed an average of one victim per day in the late 1840s.

When the government offers rewards for killing the animals, tiger hunting becomes a serious business and a favorite sport.

The last year a person would be be reported killed by a tiger will be 1890, and the last wild tiger will be shot in 1904.