British Resident of Pahang from 1896 to 1900, he stopped in Karak on January 10 to have tea with the local Penghulu chief of the Sabai mukim (sub-district), and was escorted under a royal yellow umbrella upon his arrival. He then inspected the town's Malay School, before he was greeted by the manager of the Karak Rubber Estate and its labour force. Mining activities were also prevalent in the area, with the Karak Tin Company sited next to the Bentong river, though the mine was closed down in 1957, the year of the country's independence. The Malayan Emergency In the years following the Second World War, the town and the area around it became a hotbed of communist activity perpetrated by pro-independence fighters of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), with the road from Bentong to Karak described as "at one time the most dangerous in the Federation". Even prior to a state of emergency being declared in June 1948, police found a weapons cache near Karak in 1947, discovering 27 grenades, several firearms and cases of explosives after a three-hour search. The cache was believed to have come from a Royal Air Force drop for the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army during the Japanese occupation of Malaya. Soon after hostilities broke out in 1948, MNLA fighters (termed by the government as "bandits") began to emerge from the jungle, ambushing patrols by security forces. On May 25, 1949, they ambushed two trucks heading to Karak from the village of Manchis escorted by seven Nepali Gurkhas soldiers, killing one and wounding five others, before leaving behind the bodies of two Chinese. The two bodies were later identified as Kuomintang members from the village who were abducted from their house on May 24, tied up and later killed. Two months later on July 3, the government imposed a strict curfew in 18 towns in Negeri Sembilan and Pahang including Karak, to last from 7.30pm to 5.30am every day, with all persons to remain indoors unless they had an official permit. Passenger buses heading to and from Karak were also frequently attacked, and those that didn't escape were ordered to stop, were set on fire and their occupants robbed with their identity cards seized. MNLA fighters also found their way into the town of Karak to carry out attacks. In one case on October 27, 1949, a hand grenade was thrown into a shop