Tan Kah Kee was born in Xiamen, Fujian Province in 1874 during the Qing dynasty of China. In 1890, at the age of 16, he travelled to Singapore in the Straits Settlements to help his father, who owned a rice trading business. In 1903, after his father's business collapsed, Tan started his own company and built a business empire from rubber plantations, manufacturing, sawmills, canneries, real estate, import and export brokerage, ocean transport and rice trading. As he was proficient in Hokkien, he achieved much success doing business in Singapore because Hokkien was the "lingua franca" of overseas Chinese in Singapore throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries. His business was at its prime from 1912–14, when he was known as the "Henry Ford of the Malayan community".