He translated a number of Chinese and European works into Malay, including seven volumes of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.
[1][4][5] He seems to have become a journalist around 1909, at the start of a huge boom in new Malay-language newspapers and a growth of readership due to the expansion of literacy among the non-European population.
He was charged with sedition and subversion of authority, and causing hatred between Dutch and Chinese, he was given an extremely harsh punishment of six months of forced labour.
[1] In 1915, he became editor-in-chief at Sinar Sumatra in Padang, a role he apparently held remotely and which he retained on and off until the late 1920s.
[14] He continued to publish translations and work as a journalist in the 1920s; in 1926 he was director of the Asia Press Bureau in Batavia.