The ghettoes to which the Jews restricted their daily lives could be compared to the special living quarter which the Chinese built for themselves in many towns.
Many people, outsiders and Indonesians, picture the Chinese as a predominantly urban group. In speaking of Indonesia as a whole, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that the Chinese have seemed more urban than they really were. As Table 3 shows, in 1930 a majority of the Chinese actually lived in rural areas.
However, 1930 was not a typical year. Ever since the earliest settlements of Chinese traders in the harbor towns of the north coast, the Chinese in Java had tended to congregate in the towns. When the first Europeans visited these ports, they found the Chinese traders living in separate quarters of the towns. There was nothing peculiarly Chinese about this; other foreign traders, Indians for example, did likewise. In due course the Dutch, too, found it convenient to have the Chinese living in their own quarter of the towns; there they could look after their own government, under the leadership of Chinese officers appointed by the Dutch themselves. During the 19th century, earlier and more scattered measures to confine the Chinese to the towns were elevated into a more comprehensive system by which they were required to live in designated quarters and prohibit from traveling without a government pass.
The heavy rural concentrations of Chinese in Sumatra (especially along the east coast and on the islands of Bangka and Belitung) and West Kalimantan were of longer standing. In Sumatra many thousands of Chinese had been imported to work as coolies in the tobacco plantations and tin mines; in West Kalimantan many Chinese had migrated spontaneously to mine gold and had late settled as farmers.