When the sights of the city have been exhausted a visit to Jahore on the mainland (Singapore is on a small island) of the Malay Peninsula will be interesting. Here is the summer palace of H. H. the Sultan of Jahore; also a large and handsome mosque. Here is also a wide-open gambling establishment where hundreds of Chinese may be seen playing "fantan."
On the return from Jahore, if interested in such things, a visit to a rubber estate may be made, and the whole process in the manufacture of rubber may be seen in a few hours; it is a strange and fascinating process and is, perhaps, the most important industry of the Federated Malay States.
It is interesting to compare Singapore which has been a British colony for nearly a century with Manila, a city of about the same size, that has been under American rule for less than two decades. The results that have been accomplished in the latter place along the lines of sanitation, education, and other civilizing influences should make an American proud of his native land.
VI. HOW RUBBER IS MADE.
One of the principal products of the Malay Peninsula is rubber. Like most people who have never happened to investigate the matter my ideas as to the way in which an automobile tire is extracted from a tree were very hazy; so, with another American, who had charge of a mission school in Singapore, I boarded the Jahore express on the F. M. S. R. R. (F. M. S. meaning Federated Malay States) and after a run of half an hour arrived at the Bukit Timar rubber estate some ten miles northwest of Singapore.
The Bukit Timar is an up-to-date plantation of more than one hundred thousand trees, and here we saw the whole process, from tree to sheet rubber, as shipped to all parts of the world and sold by the pound. Rubber trees grow to a considerable size, but this being a young plantation most of the trees were not over six or eight inches in diameter. In the middle of the estate was a very attractive bungalow where lived the manager and his wife, a young English couple, and the former very courteously showed us about his place and explained the different processes.
"Tapping" begins at daybreak, and all the juice or latex is collected before noon. Dozens of native and Chinese men and boys are employed in this process, some of the latter being so small that they can scarcely carry the two buckets of latex on the bamboo stick over the shoulder.
In tapping, a very thin and narrow piece of bark is gouged off, just deep enough to make the tree bleed, but not deep enough to kill it; so that by the time the bark on one side of the tree has been cut away that on the opposite side has had time to regenerate. The process is thus a perpetual one and the tree lasts indefinitely.