As a strategic and military outpost for the British, the sea lanes off the Straits of Malacca were important to be kept free from pirates and open for shipping. As the British expanded in influence and power, so Singapore stood in the gap between East and West interests as a natural deep-harbour destination that played host to the French, Portuguese, Dutch and other European navies and their men. Other seaports in Asia, from Shanghai to Calcutta, also played a role in the traffic of women and girls for prostitution.
James Francis Warren has studied the death (coroner's) reports in that colonial era that attest to the lives of the Hokkien, Teochew and Hakka and other dialect groups cast out of the Chinese mainland due to famine and abject poverty. His research tells the story of illiterate Chinese migrants working as coolies and rickshaw pullers and gives an accurate description of what life might have been for the poorest of the poor living in Singapore under the British and immediately before the Japanese Occupation.