As the situation became tenser, Governor General Adriaan Valckenier held an emergency plenary session and reinforced the guard. On 7 October 1740, a group of hundreds of Chinese Indonesians attacked a Dutch stronghold in Tanah Abang, killing 50. In response, a troop of 1,800 Company soldiers led by Gustaaf Willem van Imhoff, together with militia () and conscripts (), came to crush the revolt. The following day the Dutch repelled an attack by up to 10,000 ethnic Chinese, led by groups from nearby Tangerang and Bekasi, at the city's outer walls. 1,789 Chinese were reported to have died in this attack. Meanwhile, rumours spread among the other ethnic groups in Batavia, including slaves from Bali and Sulawesi, Bugis, and Balinese troops, that the Chinese were plotting to kill, rape, or enslave them. These groups pre-emptively burned houses belonging to ethnic Chinese along Besar River. The Dutch followed this with an assault on Chinese settlements elsewhere in Batavia in which they burned houses and killed people. For two weeks, the troops burned Chinese-owned houses and stores, killing ethnic Chinese and dumping their bodies in the Ciliwung River. Eventually an estimated 10,000 were killed in the 1740 Batavia massacre, including 500 prisoners and hospital patients. The surviving Chinese Indonesians in Batavia were moved to an area outside of the wall, in what is now Glodok. This was later applied to other cities, where Chinatowns () were built to segregate the Chinese and other ethnic groups. The event triggered a two-year war, in which Chinese and Javanese soldiers fought side by side.