a thousand Indians in 1826 are also similarly skewed towards male – 209 male and 35 female Bengalis, 772 males and 5 females from the Coromandel Coast. By 1836, the population figure had risen to 29,980, and marked a change in demographics as the Malays were outnumbered for the first time; 45.9% of the population were Chinese versus 41.9% for Malays (including Javanese and Bugis). Women from China were discouraged from emigrating, and most of the Chinese females in this early period of Singapore were likely from Malacca; it was noted in 1837 that there were no Chinese women in Singapore who had emigrated directly from China. The imbalance of the sexes continued for a long period, for example, the 1901 census figures show that there were 130,367 Chinese males compared to 33,674 Chinese females. Such imbalance also meant that fewer people were born in early Singapore, and in the first hundred years, most of the Chinese population in Singapore were immigrants. By the late 1890s, only around 10% of the Chinese population in Singapore were born there. Many of the early migrant workers from China and India did not intend to settle permanently to raise their families in Singapore; they worked to send back remittance to their families back home, and would return to China or India after they had earned enough money. Later an increasing number of Chinese chose to settle permanently in Singapore, especially in the 1920s when it became more favourable to stay in Singapore rather than returning to China. Change in social attitude in the modern era also meant that Chinese women were freer to emigrate from China, and the sex ratio began to normalise. This gradual normalisation of sex ratio led to an increase in the number of native births. Immigration continued to be the main reason for the Chinese population increase in Singapore until the 1931–1947 period when the natural increase in population surpassed the net immigration figure. After World War II, in the period from 1947 to 1957, Singapore saw a massive population increase mostly due to increased number of native births. The birth rate rose and the death rate fell; the average annual growth rate was 4.4%, of which 1% was due to immigration; Singapore experienced its highest birth rate in 1957 at 42.7 per thousand individuals. (This was also the same year the United States saw its peak birth rate.)