The Chinese in Southeast Asia have been characterized by W. F. Wertheim as a ‘trading minority’. Other writers have seen them as a ‘middleman minority’ of ‘commercial bourgeoisie’. As Wertheim himself pointed out, there are parts of the region where the Chinese perform a much broader range of occupations than simply trading. In Indonesia the distinction should be made between areas like Java where they settled amongst a relatively dense population in which in general they were unable to engage in the predominant occupation of agriculture, ant those like the east coast of Sumatra, Bangka and West Kalimantan which were still sparsely population on their arrival. Table 6 shows that it was in Java that the Chinese most closely approached the stereotype of the trading community, whereas in Sumatra they were characteristically engaged in primary production as mineworkers, farmers of fishermen.