Punjabi traders and security workers reached Southeast Asia from the late nineteenth century. Sikh communities established themselves at Bangkok, Jakarta, Medan, Manila and across the region.
The Bangkok gurdwara dates from 1912 and the community is largely in textiles and trade in the Phahurat area, which is the city's Indian quarter.
In Indonesia, Punjabi Sikhs settled at Medan and Jakarta from the 1870s, working in plantations, dairying and transport.
The Philippines had a Punjabi community from the early twentieth century, largely in moneylending and trade, and Sikhs there are still called Bumbay locally.
These are old, small, settled communities, several generations deep, speaking Punjabi at home and the local language outside, and they are almost entirely absent from Punjab's own account of its diaspora, which is about Britain, Canada and the United States.
Bhai Maharaj Singh's shrine at Singapore is the oldest Sikh site in the region.
The Thai Sikh community goes back to the late nineteenth century, built on the cloth trade, and the gurdwara at Bangkok's Phahurat market is its centre.
The Indonesian communities at Medan and Jakarta came through the same trading routes and there are gurdwaras in both. The Philippine community is small and was long associated with moneylending, which shaped how it was seen.
These settlements are older than the Canadian and British ones and they have almost no place in the way the Punjabi diaspora is usually described.