The speech-based groupings into which the China-born community was fragmented - called 'bang' in Chinese - were given spatial expression by colonial policy. As part of their divide-and-rule policy, the British had divided the central urban area into Malay, Indian and Chinese sections. The Chinese sections, in turn, were subdivided according to dialect groupings. Raffles had suggested as early as 1822 that in establishing the Chinese areas of the city, the authorities should consider that 'the people of one province are more quarrelsome than another, and that continued disputes and disturbances take place between people of different provinces.' Thus Hokkiens were concentrated on Telok Ayer and Amoy Streets, Teochews lived closer to the banks of the Singapore, while Cantonese came to be associated with the Kreta Ayer area and so on. These spatial patterns could be clearly discerned right up to the 1950s; thereafter massive public housing and urban renewal programmes changed the face of the city. Raffles would not have been surprised by the civil disturbances of the sort which the Hokkien-Teochew riots would exemplify in 1854.

Speech groups overlapped with those which turned on kinship, place of origin and occupation. According to a statistical profile of the occupations of Chinese in 1848, Hokkiens were strong in trading and general agriculture. This formed the basis for their subsequent dominance in rubber trading and banking. While Teochews - twice as numerous as Hokkiens at the time - were also well represented in trading and agriculture, more than half of them were in gambier and pepper planting, a sector which they monopolized until soil deterioration drove them to Johor in the 1850s. Both Hokkiens and Teochews were in economic sectors with significant rates of capital accumulation.

Until the formation of the Chinese Protectorate, the British did not intervene directly in the affairs of the Chinese community at large. Instead the colonial authorities worked through the local élite, composed of recognized Straits Chinese and various 'bang' leaders. These leaders usually assumed prominent roles in the plethora of clan, temple, trade and dialect-based associations which, alongside their other functions, served as Chinese self-regulating control mechanisms. It is to these 19th- and early 20th-century organizations that the thousand or so Chinese associations registered in present-day Singapore trace their origins. Consider, for example, the Ngee Ann Kongsi (Yi'an Gongsi) and the Hokkien Huay Kuan (Fujian Huiguan), both of which began life as temples, the Wak Hai Cheng Bio (Yuehaiqing Miao) and the Thian Hock Keng (Tianfu Gong) respectively. The Wak Hai Cheng Bio, located in Philip Street, near Boat Quay, was founded as a Teochew communal organization around 1820 and housed the Goddess of the Sea, Tianhou, worshipped by the seafarers of southern China. The Thian Hock Keng temple, located in Telok Ayer Street, also honoured Tianhou, whose statue was brought to Singapore in 1840. The temple was completed in 1842 with funds from Tan Tock Seng and other wealthy Hokkiens. It and the Wak Hai Cheng Bio still stand on their original sites, a testimony to their significance in the history of the Chinese in Singapore.

There were other types of association. One was linked to the system of settlement, cultivation and landholding that prevailed in the river valleys opened up for pepper and gambier planting. A so-called 'gangzhu' headed each settlement. He would recruit labourers on the basis of speech/native-place affiliation to settle and develop the plantations. He would be a member of an organization with secret society structures and initiation rituals; this was certainly the case with one such 'gangzhu', Chen Kaishun, who was a leader of the Ngee Heng (Yixing) Kongsi. (Confusingly, Chen also named one of the settlements he founded in Johor the Ngee Heng Kongsi.) Capital for 'gangzhu' to develop plantations was advanced by Chinese shopkeepers and merchant entrepreneurs (towkays) in town, money the latter would have borrowed originally from European traders. Among the towkays were holders of the revenue farms for opium and spirit, the lucrative monopoly concessions granted by the colonial authorities.

The above extract is taken from Lynn Pan, (1998). The Encyclopedia of the Overseas Chinese.