By 1740, roughly 10,000 ethnic Chinese lived inside Batavia's walls, with thousands more in settlements beyond them. Many had come as skilled artisans during the city's construction; others worked as traders, shopkeepers, and sugar mill laborers. The sugar industry had made some Chinese merchants wealthy, but the global price collapse that began in the 1720s devastated the colony. By 1740, prices had fallen to half their 1720 level. Poor Chinese sugar workers felt exploited by Dutch and Chinese elites alike, while native Batavians -- most of them impoverished -- resented the visible prosperity of Chinese neighborhoods. Into this volatile mix, the colonial government introduced a new deportation policy. Commissioner of Native Affairs Roy Ferdinand, under Valckenier's orders, decreed in July 1740 that Chinese deemed "suspicious" would be shipped to Ceylon to harvest cinnamon. Corrupt officials extorted wealthy Chinese with threats of deportation. Rumors spread that deportees were thrown overboard once out of sight of Java. Chinese workers began deserting their jobs.

On October 7, hundreds of Chinese sugar mill workers killed 50 Dutch soldiers at Meester Cornelis and Tanah Abang. The Dutch responded with 1,800 regular troops, a militia, and eleven conscript battalions. They confiscated every weapon in Chinese homes, "down to the smallest kitchen knife," and imposed a curfew. On October 8, a force estimated at 10,000 ethnic Chinese attacked the city's outer walls and were repelled; nearly 1,800 died. The next day, rumors that the Chinese were plotting to kill or enslave other ethnic groups prompted enslaved Balinese and Sulawesi people, Bugis, and Balinese soldiers to begin burning Chinese houses along the Besar River. Dutch troops joined in, firing cannons into Chinese homes. By late afternoon, soldiers under Lieutenant Hermanus van Suchtelen had positioned themselves at the poultry market and along the nearby canal. When people fled their burning homes, they were shot. Those who reached the canal were killed by soldiers in boats. The violence spread through the city for days. On October 10, Chinese patients were dragged from a hospital and killed.

Valckenier's amnesty on October 11 went unheeded. Two days later, the colonial council offered a bounty of two ducats for every Chinese head -- a reward that transformed the killing into a manhunt by gangs of irregulars from multiple ethnic groups. Only on October 22 did Valckenier issue a forceful ceasefire, blaming the unrest entirely on Chinese rebels while placing bounties of up to 500 rijksdaalders on their leaders. Outside the walls, fighting continued through November as Dutch-led forces burned sugar mills with Chinese defenders still inside. The survivors were relocated to a pecinan -- a Chinatown -- outside the city walls, in what is now Glodok. They needed special passes to leave. The massacre triggered an "open season" against ethnic Chinese across Java, with further massacres in Semarang in 1741, and later in Surabaya and Gresik. Chinese refugees who fled to Central Java allied with the Javanese Sultan Pakubuwono II, sparking a two-year war that was not fully quashed until 1743.

Valckenier's political rival, Gustaaf Willem van Imhoff, sailed to the Netherlands and convinced the Dutch East India Company's leadership that Valckenier bore responsibility. Van Imhoff returned as the new governor-general in 1743. Valckenier, arrested in Cape Town while trying to return home, was imprisoned in Fort Batavia and condemned to death in 1744. He died in his cell in 1751 before the investigation concluded; the death sentence was rescinded posthumously in 1755, and his son later received reparations of 725,000 gulden. Sugar production, which had depended heavily on Chinese labor, took until the 1760s to recover to pre-massacre levels. Dutch historian Jur Vermeulen called the massacre "one of the most striking events in 18th-century colonialism." Its traces persist in Jakarta's geography. The Tanah Abang district -- meaning "red earth" -- may take its name from the blood spilled there. Rawa Bangke, a subdistrict of East Jakarta, derives its name from bangkai, the Indonesian word for corpse. These names are quiet monuments to the people who died, embedded in the language of a city that was built on their labor.