One of the earliest known uses of the term in writing is found in the early 1600s Selden Map, which labels the Maluku Islands of Indonesia with ang mo, likely referring to the Dutch presence there.
[3] During the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company failed in its attempt to force their way into Fujian to trade in the 1620s during the Sino-Dutch conflicts and were called ang mo by the locals.
The Chinese characters for ang mo are the same as those in the historical Japanese term kōmō (紅毛), which was used during the Edo period (1603–1868) as an epithet for (Northwestern Europeans) white people.
[5] During the 19th century, Walter Henry Medhurst made a reference in his academic work A Dictionary of the Hok-Këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language that âng mô ("red haired") generally applied to the English people.
With the large migration of the Hoklo to Southeast Asia, predominantly Malaysia and Singapore, the term ang moh became more widespread and was used to refer to white people in general.