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Saigon : they were very populous before their prosperity invited 
attack from the north, and before the restless centuries came when 
Shan, Burman and Siamese wasted each other’s lands and carried off 
wholesale each other’s subjects, not for domestic slavery but to 
maintain tbeir own wasted fields. The Kedah rice fields were the 
southern f ringe of the cultivation of these kingdoms. On the other 
hand, the Malacca rice lands came to be what they are out of an over- 
flow from Palembang or Menangkabau in Sumatra, when “ the 
egrets on flapping wings ” crossed the Straits to set up colonies on a 
coast which undulated like their own home. Both extensions invited 
European establishments in turn, Malacca first when the Portuguese 
found trade possible and profitable, and the Kedah area next, when 
Francis Light after living in it, built up the settlement of Penang 
upon its edge, well chosen and not foodless like the decaying settle- 
ment of Bencoolen. 
There was something in the success of Malacca and Penang 
which might have read a lesson thirty years ago in frhe opening up 
of the Federated Malay States, to those who tried very earnestly to 
settle small colonies of rice growers in various places. So many of 
these colonies perished from their smallness. It had been easier 
then to have built on to the edge of that which existed : and it 
appears easier now to work at the extension of the Krian rice 
area than to dissipate efforts in diverse directions. I look upon 
Krian as the area for results in rice. But turning to Malacca, if? 
must be noticed how limited, there, is the field for expansion, 
and that the problem is the maintenance of the sawahs and the 
getting of the landholders to rise to overriding those disadvantages 
to which they have been put by the ^washing of silt from the 
cleared uplands on to the paddy land. 
Although rice grows in water, soil aeration is most important 
to it. Stagnant water is very inimical. There needs to be a 
movement over the surface ; and there must be a movement through 
the soil. The best rice land is particularly open in texture. It is 
the practice to grow in the Peninsula one rice crop only in the year 
and to let the weeds riot on the land during the rest of the twelve 
months. When sowing time is coming round these weeds are 
ploughed iu and make valuable green manure. Such a practice is 
by no means confined to the Peninsula but is very wide spread 
where rice is grown : its working has been studied particularly in 
Southern India, and it has been found what an important additional 
part the ploughed-in weeds play in the aeration of the soil. Down 
that avenue which points to greater profit from paddy by taking 
a crop from off the land in the fallow we may only look, bearing in 
mind the need ©f the fields of this green manuring which the second 
crop would disturb. 
There are various places in the East where a second rice crop 
is grown in the fallow time, a quicker growing and less profitable 
