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The sometimes precarios position of the Chinese in Indonesia has a long history. The (most probably) nineteenth-century author, Apdul Mutalip, advocated a more balanced view by pointing out some fundamental contributions the Chinese had made to the welfare of the Javanese; he also demonstrates that their presence in Java has a basis in law. Although seems like a poem in Jabanese metre, his Sajarah Cina, written in Javanese, is remarkble not only for its subject matter but also for the way the material is presented, in a rhetoric unknown to exist in Javanese literature by most scholars.