This CSSH-Seed Grant–funded project explores the 19th-century history of Batavia through digital analysis of a selection of Gongguan (Chinese Council) meeting minutes from Batavia (Jakarta), the most complete surviving records of a premodern overseas Chinese council, spanning roughly the mid-18th – mid-20th centuries. These records shed light on the networks and institutions that informed Raffles’ founding of Singapore as well as the growth and sustainability of its early population of Chinese settlers. Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the project transforms these handwritten documents into structured, searchable data. Analysis of the Gongguan texts reveals important dynamics of Chinese merchant networks, trade routes, social organisations, and community governance, providing new insights into the economic and social foundations that shaped both Batavia as well as early Singapore and its regional connections. The project will deliver an OCR pipeline to process an initial 40 pages of Gongguan Council Minutes, with plans to scale to the full collection of 603 volumes alongside the expansive and untranscribed collection of Gongguan Trade Logs. In the next phase, advanced NLP methods will be applied to extract names, places, dates, and relationships at scale from these texts, mapping the social, economic, and political networks that shaped 19th-century maritime Southeast Asia and Singapore.