Ajayeb, subeuhanallah, leungo lon kisah raja.
Wonder, listen, for I will talk of kings. ~ Hikayat Pocut Muhammad, Acehnese chronicle, 18th century
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(see notes below if you're unsure what a reference is about)
Palembang, 1762.
"If Palembang remains so intransigent, sir," said the Dutch Resident in hesitant Malay, "there is little we can do but to stop firing money at the city and start firing cannons instead."
The Palembanger sighed. Wrapped up in shimmering golden cloth with a
kris blade strapped to the waist, this man was virtually indistinguishable from the natives of Sumatra, the Resident thought, indeed a poor specimen of the Chinese nation. He was one of those they called
peranakan, those Chinese who had turned Moor - and like the native Moors whose faith he had adopted, this Chinese was an arrogant creature, confident in his delusions of native grandeur. How often the Company had proven those delusions wrong. Would it do so again, here in Palembang?
"His Highness the Sultan hoped it would not come to this," the Chinese said wearily, "but we are not Java, sir. In that island the land is fertile and filled to the brim with people. Not so here. Palembang and Jambi are countries of deep mountains and deeper jungles, of perilous mangrove swamps where roads remake themselves whenever the weather shifts. Here the rivers are swift and the rapids are many, and villages are few and far between. Who could compel our people to submit? Certainly not the
Kompeni. Not even the young Alexander could conquer such an uncompromising land." He paused for a moment, then asked, "And brother to brother, I ask you frankly: why does your Batavia so strongly oppose a friendly union of siblings?"
I am not your brother, the Resident almost said, but he held his tongue. The Chinese had asked him something about a friendly union of siblings. Yes, that was why he was here. There were two kingdoms in southeastern Sumatra, Jambi to the north and Palembang to the south. Both kingdoms had long been allies of the East India Company, the latter especially profitable, first for its pepper and now for its tin. But Jambi had not been as fortunate as her neighbor. For a lifetime the country had seldom known of peace, and every king in Jambi had, at one point or another, been opposed by his subjects. The current king, Anum, was no exception. Faced with an unruly court calling for his removal, Anum had had no choice but to invite Prince Natakusuma, both the brother of Palembang's king and the husband of a Jambi princess, to assume the silken parasol of Jambinese kings.
And this, the Company could not accept. A Palembang prince under Jambi's parasol?
Ondenkbaar! (
Unthinkable!) Palembang was already among the richest realms in all the islands of the Indies. With the resources of Jambi on hand, what would stop the sultan from casting aside the pepper and tin monopolies that his ancestors had granted the Dutch East India Company? The Company was in decline and its empire no longer ruled by its own might, if it ever had; it stood on a foundation stone of native collaboration and native division. It was vital to keep a balance between native kings or the very fundamentals of empire would break down, and Dutch power in the Indies would be relegated to history, as that of the Portuguese had a century before. So the Resident had delivered his superiors' disapproval of the possibility of Natakusuma's crowning to Palembang's court. If the prince was crowned, he had said, there would very possibly be war. But like so many an Oriental lord, the king of Palembang was an obstinate man. His brother
would be king of Jambi, and the Company
would, in one way or another, recognize his brother as such. And so here he was.
But the Resident could hardly say all this to the frowning Chinese who sat before him now. "The Company does not wish that Natakusuma be king of Jambi, sir," he told the Chinese, "because it is not beneficial for our realm - or for yours."
"We do not share the same outlook on the future, I see." Remarked the Chinese. Before the Resident could respond, he cleared his voice and went on. "The
Kompeni grows ever weaker. You must know, if not openly admit, that it is not what it was before. The war in Java must have very nearly bankrupted you, has it not? Bugis vessels roam all the seas below the winds, and you can do but nothing. Your monopolies are declining, your coffers grow empty. I have heard that Makassar trades more with Amoy than with Batavia. Is not all this true?" The Resident was silent. The sheer arrogance of this heathen Chinese irked him, but he did not know how to respond - because it
was, for the most part, all true. The Company was in decline, just as the Dutch Republic itself was. And perhaps, the Resident thought, the Company
would lose calamitously to Palembang, with its deep mountains and deeper jungles. What a terrifying humiliation that would be!
"You are quiet, sir. I understand that it is not an easy thing for a man to admit that his country is crumbling like a city of sand when it meets the waves. But be as it may. You have had many discussions before. This shall be your last, for we have realized that the Company cannot be convinced by any means other than the heat of blood and the cold of the
kris. Natakusuma shall assume the royal parasol within the month. Then there will probably, very probably, be a war between you Hollanders and us. And it is a war that we shall win, through the might of His Highness's subjects and through the assistance of the Almighty."
The
peranakan left, leaving the Resident alone with his attendants, deep in thought. Perhaps Palembang would win. Perhaps his Company would win. But who cared who won in the end? Not this Resident, at least. All he wanted was to survive and eventually leave this damned jungle island of Sumatra, to not be killed in the terrible storm that seemed about to break.
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Notes: The POD is that Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin of Palembang (r. 1757-1774) was more insistent that his brother, Prince (
pangeran) Natakusuma, become king of Jambi. In 1761 Sultan Anum of Jambi did ask Natakusuma to assume the parasol as co-monarch of Jambi, but the fierce disapproval of the Dutch East India Company convinced Sultan Ahmad to not take up the offer. Here things are quite different.
"There is little we can do but to stop firing money at the city and start firing cannons instead" is a reference to a famous quote by Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin I of Palembang's (r. 1724-1757) famous quip: "I cannot understand why kings who are friends with the Company quarrel with it, while experience shows us that they always succumb and the Company triumphs. I war with the Company, but in quite a different manner. I fire pepper and tin at the Company, and it bombards me with good Spanish rials."
"Shimmering golden cloth" is a reference to
kain songket cloth. A
kris is a bladed weapon found throughout Indonesia, imbued with great ritual significance besides its use in battle. "Turn Moor" is to become Muslim, and by extension adopt features of Islamic Malay culture, as the
peranakan Chinese did. Batavia (now reverted to its old name of Jakarta) was the capital of the Dutch East India Company's empire. A yellow parasol is the symbol of monarchy in Island Southeast Asia, equivalent to a crown in Europe.
The "war in Java" is a reference to the rebellion of Prince Mangkubumi and the Third Javanese War of Succession (1749-1757), which did indeed heavily strain the Company's coffers. The
Bugis are a people of South Sulawesi who were renowned for their martial prowess and engaged in piracy and conquest throughout much of Indonesia. "Below the winds" is a Malay term for Island Southeast Asia. Makassar, a Dutch outpost, did indeed end up trading more with the Chinese port of Xiamen (Amoy) and not Batavia by the late 18th century, demonstrating how much the Company's commercial order had collapsed.