458 Part VI: European Empires in Asia
world left China helpless, humiliated, bitter, and extremely cautious about giv-
ing it all another try. The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s should be viewed not
just against the backdrop of the Communist experiments of the Great Leap
Forward and the Cultural Revolution but also against the conditions of China’s
experiences during its Treaty Century.“Below the Winds”—Colonizing the Islands
On the Malay Peninsula and in the islands of Southeast Asia, Malay-
speakers identified their region as “below the winds,” that is, below the mon-
soons that picked up moisture from the southern seas and dumped it on India,
the Southeast Asian mainland, and southern China. Outsiders from “above the
winds”—Arabs, Gujaratis, Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans—rode these
winds into Malay territories to trade.
Muslim traders from India had brought a new faith to peoples below the
winds as Hinduism and Buddhism had come earlier. A Hindu prince of
Malacca named Parameshvara converted to Islam and changed his name to
Megot Iskander Shah, and because of the strategic and commercial importance
of the Sultanate of Malacca (1403–1511), Islam rapidly spread among the
Malay chiefs of the region. As the Thai had once embraced Buddhism to dis-
tinguish themselves from the more powerful Khmer Hindus, Malay princes
fighting off Thai ambitions found the new religious identity useful.
Thus, as British trading ships began to pass through the straits and the
waters of the South China Sea on their way to Canton, they encountered a
number of Malay-Muslim sultans in control of coasts where they thought it
would be convenient to have one or two dependable (British) ports of call. In
1785 Captain Francis Lightfoot rendered a little military assistance to the Sul-
tan of Kedah and received the island of Penang in return. In 1819 Stamford
Raffles took advantage of a little conflict between two other Malay chiefs to
acquire the island of Singapore. The Dutch had long since booted the Portu-
guese from Malacca, but turned it over to Britain in 1824 when the two nations
signed the Anglo-Dutch treaty identifying separate spheres of interest to keep
them out of trouble with each other. The Dutch would keep to the lower
islands of Indonesia, while the British would keep to the Malay Peninsula. This
gave Britain three key cities—Penang, Malacca, and Singapore—which
merged as the Straits Settlements in 1826. At first they were governed from
Calcutta, but in 1867 the Straits Settlements became a Crown Colony ruled
directly from London.
These changes, and others, created a good deal of turmoil on the peninsula
in the early nineteenth century. Chinese were moving south in large numbers
fleeing the Taiping Rebellion; this migration, part of a southward migration
that had been going on for several centuries, left a legacy of expatriate Chinese
communities in many Southeast Asian towns and cities. On the peninsula,
many worked inland at opening up tin mines for commercial profit (40 percent
of the world’s tin comes from Malaysia). In coastal towns they established trad-