The tin rush of the Kinta Valley

Imagine the Kinta River in the late 1880s. Muddy water runs through wooden sluices. Men work in long lines in the open pits. Nearby, a market gardener has traded his vegetable plot for a share in a mine.

The story

The Kinta Valley lies in Perak. Rich tin deposits near Rotan Dahan set off the Kinta Tin Rush, which Ipoh's historians date from 1884 to 1889. The town of Ipoh grew quickly beside it. By the early 1900s it was called the most favoured town in Malaya, and tin made more millionaires there than in any other Malayan town.

The people who built it were many. Early squatter settlements were mostly Chinese. Some of the first fortunes went to Chinese Christian market gardeners who had settled near Batu Gajah in the 1880s. Many later became mine owners. Mandailing families, who came from Sumatra, took part too. Raja Asal, a Mandailing leader from Sumatra, opened the first Mandailing settlement in the valley at Pangkalan Kacha, now called Changkat Piatu, and was allowed to work mines between Kinta and Blanja. Indian workers, mostly Tamil, came for the tin and the rubber booms.

Ipoh's population grew from 23,978 in 1911 to 53,183 in 1931.

The hard part, told plainly. Mining was dangerous. In 1894, one in five patients admitted to Ipoh hospital died, mostly of beriberi, a sickness caused by poor diet. In the late 1890s a fall in tin prices left about 18,000 miners without work. Soil washed from the mines silted the Kinta River until its bed rose by more than eight feet in thirty years, and floods struck in 1918, 1919, 1924, 1925 and December 1926. When the Great Depression came, tin was restricted in 1931. Dredges and mines closed. More than 20,000 Chinese were repatriated from Perak alone, and many others were stranded. Community help mattered: The Chettiar community paid for meals for poor Tamil and Chinese miners during the slump.

Where you can still see it today

The Kinta Valley's mining pools, left behind where the old mines were.
Shophouses, clan halls and temples in Ipoh's old town.
The foods of the Chinese, Malay, Mandailing and Indian families who settled here, from Ipoh's coffee shops to its curry houses.
Changkat Piatu, where the Mandailing leader Raja Asal is buried beside the Kinta River.

What DNA can tell, and what it cannot

The Kinta Valley's families come from many places. A region estimate can show which parts of the world your DNA looks most like, such as southern China, South Asia or the Malay world. It cannot say which valley your family lived in.

Your mother line or father line may point to East Asia, South Asia or Southeast Asia. Many Kinta families carry a mix. Each line is only one thread of your family tree.

DNA does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status. It cannot show what job your family did, or which community they belonged to.