Punjabis were recruited into police forces and security work across the British empire in Asia from the 1880s: the Straits Settlements police, the Hong Kong police, the Shanghai Municipal Police, and the Malay States Guides.
The Sikh policeman in a turban was a fixture of colonial Hong Kong and Shanghai and appears in a great deal of period photography and fiction. The Central Sikh Gurdwara at Singapore dates from 1912, the Khalsa Diwan Sikh Temple at Hong Kong from 1901.
Many stayed. There are Punjabi communities in Malaysia and Singapore now in their fifth generation, speaking Punjabi at home and Malay or English outside.
Bhai Maharaj Singh, who led the resistance to British rule in Punjab until his arrest in December 1849, died in a Singapore prison in 1856 and his shrine there is maintained.
The colonial recruitment that produced these communities is the same recruitment that produced the martial races policy, and its results are visible on three continents.
Punjabi migration to Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong began with police and watchman recruitment in the nineteenth century, and these are among the oldest overseas Sikh settlements.
The Sikh policeman was a colonial institution across the eastern ports, from Shanghai to Penang, and the gurdwaras in those cities were founded by the men in those forces.
The communities are now small, settled and prosperous, and their gurdwaras are among the oldest continuously used anywhere outside the subcontinent.