He tried to free the Indonesians from both native aristocracy and Chinese middlemen by abolishing tax farms and rental concessions and by collecting taxes directly in money. But in the cash-poor village economy, tax money had to be furnished by Chinese moneylenders, who sometimes demanded land as security; thus, more wealth than ever passed to the Chinese, who became the essential middlemen for the transition to a money economy. Raffles considered the 100,000 Peranakan Chinese to be ten times wealthier than all the Europeans in the Indies.