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difficult problems to the governments concerned, and cruel, drastic, but ineffectual attempts were made to halt immigration. The massacres of thousands of Chinese in the Philippines in 1603, 1639, and again after the British occupation of 1763, are the most celebrated of many such occurrences, the last being caused by the Chinese having shown a marked preference for British rather than Spanish rule. In Indonesia the worst massacre took place at Batavia in 1740. Similar pogroms, but on a much smaller scale, continued in the Philippines down to 1820, and post-war Indonesia has shown a disquieting tendency to put the clock back two centuries in their treatment of their Chinese. But although victims of periodic bouts of xenophobia from the local peoples, in most countries of South-east Asia and at most times the Chinese were protected by the colonial governments which recognised the value of Chinese labour for their economies.
By the early decades of the 19th century the coolie trade between China and South-east Asia had attained substantial proportions -- although still nothing like so great as it was to become later -- and most of the trade was in the hands of Chinese junks of from 300 to 400 tons. Such craft could only sail before the wind and carried crews of up to ninety sailors, enough to man five European ships of the same size. They took anything from twenty to thirty days between south China and the Straits or Bangkok, and the coolies had a very uncomfortable time on the passage. No charts were carried, the only navigational instrument being a very rude compass, and they kept as close to land as possible. In the 1830s up to eighty such junks sailed to Bangkok every year, usually from Swatow, and by the mid 1840s, by which time European steamships were entering the trade, it was estimated that about 15,000 coolies were emigrating to Bangkok every year.
A description of these old trading junks is given in S. Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom (London, W. H. Allen & Co. revised edition, 1883) vol. 1, p. 753. It shows inter alia that the number of passengers carried on these junks to the Nanyang could be very great. ... "The cabins look more like niches in a sepulchre than the accommodations for a live passenger. The crew lie upon deck most of the time, and are usually interested in the trade of the vessel or an adventure of their own. The great number of passengers which have been stowed in these vessels entailed a frightful loss of life when they were wrecked. In February, 1822, Capt. Pearl, of the English ship Indiana, coming through Gaspar Straits, fell in with the cargo and crew of a wrecked junk, and saved one hundred and ninety-eight persons (out of one thousand six hundred with whom she had left Amoy)." Ed.