CHAPTER FIVE: CROSSING TO THE MALAY LOWLANDS - Sumatra Travelogue

The ICOMOS tour that had carried us this far, its own scholars, its own settled pace, its own itinerary fixed weeks in advance, wound up after its first week, in Batusangkar, and most of the group flew home the following morning. Marianne and I did not. What remained of the trip, Riau, Jambi and South Sumatra, we would now cover entirely on our own account, and the first decision was practical: I had no confident sense of the driving time or road conditions between three provincial capitals spread across several hundred kilometres of lowland Sumatra, the kind of stretch that can swallow an unplanned day whole, so we chose, in the end, simply to fly between them, via Jakarta.

Getting around inside each city fell to a method I had been oddly reluctant to try until this trip forced the issue: hiring a car and driver over WhatsApp. I had assumed, going in, that arranging something as consequential as a full day's transport with a stranger through a messaging app, in a country where a working command of Indonesian remained beyond me, was asking for trouble. It turned out to be the opposite. The trick, once we found it, was straightforward: search out car rental listings with a substantial run of positive reviews, message several in parallel, and negotiate the day rate through Google Translate, our stilted Indonesian and their stilted English both arriving legible enough that the language barrier stopped mattering within a message or two. We came away, city after city, with full-day car-and-driver hire, air-conditioned, fuel included, for around one million rupiah, something like fifty-six US dollars, sometimes less, a price that would not have covered half a day of the same service booked through a hotel concierge.

Hotel costs ran to a similarly startling arithmetic. Pekanbaru, Jambi and Palembang see relatively few international visitors compared with Bali or even Padang, and it showed in the rates: a perfectly respectable three- or four-star room, air-conditioned, hot water, a lift that worked, cost us as little as forty US dollars a night, with a genuinely lavish buffet breakfast, nasi goreng, satay, a dozen kinds of kueh, fresh fruit, added on for perhaps two or three dollars more. I found myself doing the arithmetic more than once and coming up short: at that price, how does a modern hotel with a full kitchen and a night shift actually turn a profit? Labour and food costs, in provincial Indonesia, are simply low enough that day-to-day running is easy to cover; the real expense, land and construction, is a cost most owners had already absorbed years earlier, often on ground their own family already held, and recovering it on any particular guest's bill was plainly not the point. For a locally prominent businessman, owning the best hotel in his home city functions less like a return-seeking investment than like building a fine house in the family village: a venue for entertaining, a visible marker of standing, its own kind of advertisement, worth having on the books whether or not it was ever priced to pay for itself.

We left the highlands for Riau by way of Minangkabau International Airport, and the descent alone told half the story: green volcanic ridges giving way, within thirty minutes, to a flat, hazy lowland stitched together with palm oil plantations running to the horizon in every direction, peatland and monoculture where lowland rainforest once stood. From the air, and later from the car window on the long drive across the province, Riau presented itself candidly as what it now largely is: an economy built on extraction, oil rigs and refinery flares by night, oil palm by day, a province that in recent seasons has watched its own share of the wealth it produces shrink with uncomfortable speed: the palm oil revenue-sharing allocation returned to Riau by the central government in Jakarta fell from over 390 billion rupiah in 2023 to barely 96 billion by 2026, a decline that has left the province's own economists publicly calling for a fairer split of a wealth that leaves this soil but rarely seems to return to it.

While we waited at Minangkabau International Airport for the short domestic hop to Pekanbaru, I fell into conversation with an elderly Dutch couple at the next gate, on their way home after a holiday retracing their own family's roots in Sawahlunto. Their grandparents, they told us, had lived there once, before the outbreak of the war for independence sent them back across the sea to a country most of their descendants had never called home in any deeper sense. The locals, they said, had gone out of their way to help them find the old public records, and the ruins of the house where their grandparents had lived. It struck me then, as it would strike me again and again on this journey, how little rancour actually survives in the everyday encounter between the colonised and the descendants of the coloniser, even as the larger political reckoning, of reparations, of royal apologies, of who owes whom for what, remains, at the level of nations, still only half begun.

M.H. van der Valk, a Dutch civil servant who documented the Siak River basin in the early twentieth century, caught the essential character of this stretch of coast in a single sentence that could as easily describe the province today: “Pekanbaru is the gateway where the dense jungle of the Riau lowlands meets the river highways. It is a land of timber, trade, and quiet Malay villages perched on stilts above the brown waters.” The stilt villages have mostly given way to concrete and the timber trade has been overtaken many times over by oil and palm, but the sense of a gateway, a place defined by what passes through it rather than by what stays, has, if anything, only sharpened with the decades.

Pekanbaru itself surprised me with its order: clean, well-planned streets, a skyline dominated by the striking red-and-yellow fan of cables on the Siak IV Bridge, officially the Jembatan Sultan Abdul Jalil Alamuddin Syah, its angled pylons deliberately echoing Malay ornamental motifs. The city began as a modest trading post called Senapelan before being renamed in 1784 as Pekan Baru, “New Market,” and the name has proven prophetic: driven by oil and palm oil, its population has swollen past 1.1 million, most of them, in a detail that startled me on our first morning, dressed in some version of civil service uniform. Even the roadside billboards reinforced the impression: huge campaign portraits of governors and mayors, of provincial and national assembly members, showed almost every politician posed in uniform rather than in batik or a business suit, elected officials and rank-and-file civil servants alike apparently drawing on the same wardrobe, a continuation, we came to realise, of a colonial habit of dress never quite retired.

It is, we learned, a genuine institutional inheritance from the colonial period: the Dutch East Indies administration split governance between a Binnenlands Bestuur staffed by Dutch officials and an Inlands Bestuur staffed by native civil servants, largely drawn from the Javanese priyayi aristocracy, the direct institutional ancestor of today's uniformed, ranked PNS corps. But the actual khaki-and-batik uniform now worn is a deliberately post-colonial invention. Sukarno, we were told by way of explaining the color palette, rejected anything resembling Dutch colonial dress outright, associating white uniforms too closely with the memory of subjugation, and chose instead a military-inflected style meant to signal a decisive break with the past even while keeping the underlying bureaucratic machinery, rank, insignia, hierarchy, largely intact. A ranked, uniformed officialdom, in other words, is a Dutch inheritance; the specific colours it wears today were chosen expressly to erase the memory of where the whole system came from.

A short drive away on Jalan Diponegoro, facing the Governor's own residence, we stopped at Tugu Perjuangan Rakyat, the People's Struggle Monument that everyone in Pekanbaru simply calls Tugu Api, the Flame Monument, inaugurated on 17 August 1984, Independence Day itself, under Governor Imam Munandar. Two bronze-red figures tower over the plaza, cast mid-stride and shoulder to shoulder: a uniformed soldier of the republic's army, rifle slung, and beside him an ordinary civilian gripping nothing more than a sharpened bamboo spear, the bambu runcing that became independence-era Indonesia's own improvised, almost devotional weapon, the two of them standing in for the alliance of army and ordinary people the monument's designers wanted remembered as having actually won the revolution.

Flame sculptures, stylised and wind-blown, rise at five separate points around the base, meant to keep a fighting spirit permanently alight rather than let it cool into mere commemoration, and the whole structure stands on a plinth carved in relief with the struggle itself, ambush, flight, open confrontation, compressed into a continuous frieze and flanked by a pair of old cannon on either side. Even the geometry is doing political work here, deliberately and without much subtlety: the plaza itself is triangular, an arrowhead pointing straight at the flagpole where the Merah Putih flies; the platform beneath the figures is five-sided and rises in four tiers, a compressed shorthand for Pancasila's five principles and the year independence was declared, '45; and the statues' own pedestal is octagonal, a quieter reference to August, the month the whole thing happened. It is a monument built to be read as much as looked at, every angle of concrete carrying a number an Indonesian schoolchild is expected to recognise on sight.

At Masjid Raya An-Nur, the “Taj Mahal of Riau,” ten domes and four minarets rising from grounds that have tripled in size since the 1960s, we were shown around by two teenage volunteer guides, a brother and sister working the weekend shift. When the seventeen-year-old sister heard that I taught at Nanyang Technological University, her whole manner changed, eyes lit, questions coming faster. She had set her heart on studying psychology there, she told me, and she rattled off NTU's climb in the QS World University Rankings, twelfth now, up from fifteenth the year before, with the fluency of someone who had memorised it the way other teenagers memorise song lyrics.

It is not an isolated case of aspiration. Indonesia's own Vice President, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, studied at Orchid Park Secondary School before earning his degree at the Management Development Institute of Singapore; President Prabowo Subianto spent part of his boyhood in Singapore during his family's years of political exile before continuing his schooling in London. Singapore's reputation in this corner of the region is not incidental soft power. It is earned, city by university ranking, one shining-eyed seventeen-year-old at a time, and it carries a weight of responsibility that I felt rather more acutely walking out of that mosque than I had walking in.

We also gave an hour to the Museum Sang Nila Utama, Riau's provincial museum, a squat, tiered-roof building in what the museum itself calls the Wadhang style, signalling deep-rooted Melayu identity from the car park alone. The collection inside turned out smaller and thinner than the building's ambitions: a case of Malay wedding regalia, some ceremonial weaponry, a few careful replicas of Siak Sultanate treasures, the originals of which, we already knew from the palace itself, mostly survive elsewhere or not at all. What actually held my attention were the murals rather than the artefacts, walls of them, painted in the bright, flattened style of a schoolbook illustration, working through Riau Malay adat, weddings, circumcision rites, betel-chewing etiquette, several of which I recognised, with a small jolt, as customs still quietly kept by Malay families back in Singapore.

What I could not immediately work out, standing in front of the entrance signage, was the name itself: Sang Nila Utama is, by every account I had grown up with, a Palembang prince, Srivijaya's own, who sailed north to found Singapura, not a figure with any obvious claim on Riau at all. The museum's own answer, it turns out, sidesteps the objection rather than denying it, leaning entirely on the chapter of the Sejarah Melayu in which he is based on Bintan, part of today's Riau Islands, before ever crossing to Temasek, and treating him less as someone who personally ruled the Riau mainland than as the mythic founding ancestor of the whole Melaka-Johor-Riau-Lingga royal line that Riau's own Malay aristocracy still traces itself back to. It is a very Malay solution to an awkward genealogical fact: when a founding hero belongs, strictly speaking, to somewhere else, claim the chapter of his story that happens to touch your own shore, and let the dynasty do the rest of the explaining.

Even that solution turns out to rest on ground shakier than the museum's own signage lets on. Riau Islands and the Riau mainland were, until fairly recently, a single province, also called Riau; Kepulauan Riau split off as its own province only in September 2002, formalised under Law No. 25/2002, taking Bintan and the rest of the archipelago, the very ground on which Sang Nila Utama is supposed to have based himself before crossing to Temasek, into a separate provincial government entirely. Sang Nila Utama's one remaining claim on Riau, in other words, now sits across a provincial border that did not exist when the museum's founders chose his name. A reduced mainland Riau, no longer sharing a government with the one part of the old province that actually supplies its founding hero's credentials, might reasonably ask itself whether the name still earns its keep. Perhaps it is time for a change.

Riau's food announced itself with the same regional specificity I would find at every stop on this journey, proof, if any were needed, that Singapore's own “nusantara” food scene, however proud we are of it, only ever samples the shallow end of Indonesia's culinary depth. It was here, over the first of several meals that had nothing to do with Padang cooking, that I found myself thinking about how thoroughly Minangkabau food has come to stand in, both at home in Singapore and across much of the wider world, for Indonesian cuisine as a whole. It is not a fair trade. Riau alone has its own deep and largely un-exported repertoire, Melayu river cooking built around catfish, sago, and spices carried up the Siak and Kampar for centuries, and every province on this trip would go on to insist, in its own kitchen, that Indonesian food is a federation of distinct culinary traditions rather than a single cuisine with Padang standing at its head.

We drove specifically across town to find Bebek Hitam, fried duck in a black chilli sauce whose bumbu is stirred patiently for nearly two hours until it darkens from deliberate slow cooking rather than burning, served alongside a raw sambal sharpened with shredded young mango, a dish more associated with Madura and East Java than with Riau itself, but sought out here with the same delighted, slightly obsessive pursuit that had, on a previous evening, sent us hunting down a small shop called Bolu Kemojo Mini Mimie on Jalan Pepaya.

On that occasion, we were looking for Pekanbaru's own signature cake: dense, sweet, coloured a distinctive brownish-green from pandan and suji leaf, baked in a mould shaped like a frangipani blossom, a recipe once made only for family occasions before a woman named Ibu Dinawati commercialised it around 1998 and turned it into the province's best-known souvenir. The shop owner, delighted to have a customer from Singapore, insisted on photographs before we left, a small warm transaction that repeated itself, in one form or another, in nearly every market stall and museum counter across four provinces, the reflexive, unforced pleasure Indonesians so often take in a Singaporean visitor who has bothered to come this far off the usual tourist track.

At the Gulai Ikan Patin restaurant near the airport, we were served five variations of river catfish curry at once, the broth rich with turmeric, galangal and lemongrass, spices that, our host explained, worked their way into Riau's cooking over centuries as traders from China, the Middle East and India passed along the Siak, Kampar, Indragiri and Rokan rivers that define the province's geography as surely as any political boundary. I confessed, perhaps undiplomatically, that I found the dish rather ordinary; I am no connoisseur of freshwater fish, and Riau's most celebrated culinary icon simply did not move me the way Sawahlunto's coal-black history, or Pandai Sikek's gold thread, had. Not every pilgrimage yields a revelation, and a travel writer owes his reader honesty on this point as much as on any other.

The drive out to Muara Takus supplied its own kind of history lesson, this one written in engineering rather than inscription. For long stretches beyond Pekanbaru's edge, the road runs flat between oil palm plantations, rows of young, still-short palms reaching to the horizon under an overcast sky, long water-filled canals cut parallel between the rows, transmission pylons striding along behind them. Closer to the site the plantations give way to older, taller stands of palm and denser roadside greenery, a motorcyclist balancing an improbably large load threading past on the shoulder as the road climbs a slight incline, power poles marching off into bright morning sun.

The canals, it turns out, are not there chiefly to water the palms; they are there to keep the ground beneath them wet. The flat lowlands of eastern Sumatra sit on peat, waterlogged, largely undecomposed plant matter that has been quietly accumulating here for thousands of years, in places since well before Sriwijaya's navy or Sang Sapurba's line existed, built up layer by layer into deposits several metres deep. Left saturated, that peat is one of the most efficient carbon stores on the planet. Drained for plantation agriculture, it dries out, oxidises, and turns ferociously combustible, which is exactly the risk those canals are engineered against: Sumatran peat fires, once alight underground, can smoulder for weeks, shrug off rain, and blanket the whole Strait in haze that reaches Singapore's own skies most years without any of us back home ever tracing it to a canal beside a road exactly like this one.

An hour outside Pekanbaru, at Muara Takus, we found the architectural zenith of the Srivijaya Empire reduced to a modest, near-deserted compound of red brick and sandstone, its centrepiece stupa, Candi Mahligai, tapering with a slenderness that recalls Ashokan India and Sri Lankan stupa design far more than the familiar bell-shaped silhouette of Java's Borobudur. We arrived at twenty past eight in the morning to find the site entirely empty, the whole eleventh-century Buddhist compound walkable in twenty unhurried minutes, a UNESCO tentative-list candidate since 2009, still waiting, its conservators fighting a slow, unglamorous battle against tropical damp and erosion in fragile old brickwork nobody outside a small circle of archaeologists seems to be watching closely. The site's toilet block, by contrast, had collapsed into a set of stagnant, mosquito-breeding puddles that felt, uncomfortably, like the more urgent conservation priority. By the time we had finished walking the ruins, a coconut stall had opened nearby, and in the interest of full disclosure: we spent rather longer drinking fresh coconut water and scraping out the flesh than we had spent examining eleventh-century Buddhist brickwork. Some pilgrimages end not in transcendence but in a very good coconut.

Arms, flag and map of the Sultanate of Siak Sri Indrapura, a former princely state in the Dutch East Indies.

At Siak Sri Indrapura, the old riverside seat of the Siak Sultanate, the story properly starts not with the palace itself but with a claim so audacious it still reads more like romance than history. Its founder, later styled Sultan Abdul Jalil Rahmat Shah, is remembered locally simply as Raja Kecil, “the little king,” and Malay chronicles insist he was conceived on the very eve of the 1699 murder of Sultan Mahmud Shah II, the last ruler of the old Melaka-Johor line, killed by his own Bendahara's faction, who moved swiftly afterward to eliminate every one of Mahmud's wives rather than risk a posthumous heir surfacing later.

One pregnant consort, Che Mi by name, is said to have slipped away before the purge reached her and given birth in secret among the Minangkabau highlands; a more embellished telling, the one some authors clearly preferred, has Mahmud's royal seed rescued instead by a bidadari, a fairy, and carried to term inside a hollow bamboo stalk. Malay historiography has never fully settled which version, if either, is true. What is not in dispute is what the boy, raised quietly under the name Tuan Bujang, did with the story once he was grown: in the mid-1710s he rallied Minangkabau merchants and mercenaries at the port of Bengkalis, produced a kris he claimed could turn ordinary water into gold as proof of his royal blood, and by March 1718 had fought his way into Johor's own capital and seized its throne outright.

He did not hold it long, or well. Four chaotic years of half-rule, broken alliances and a final, fatal order to assassinate Johor's Bendahara drove the murdered man's sons into the arms of Bugis mercenaries, who threw Raja Kecil back out of Johor for good and installed their own client sultan in his place. Rather than vanish, Kecil retreated to eastern Sumatra and founded a new court of his own on the Siak river instead, in 1723, keeping the same disputed royal title and daring anyone left alive to disprove it. The palace itself still stands today in genuine, well-preserved splendour, an eclectic pile of Malay, Arab and European ornament raised in solid brick and stucco rather than the timber every other palace on this trip had been, its rooms hung with the personal effects of its last and most consequential ruler, Sultan Syarif Kasim II. Where so many of the East Sumatran sultanates met their end in the violent “Social Revolution” of 1946, Langkat, Deli, Serdang, Asahan, their royal families slaughtered by revolutionary forces determined to sweep away feudal privilege in a single, bloody stroke, Syarif Kasim II chose an entirely different fate for his own house.

Raffles himself drew Siak into this same great game nearly a century after Raja Kecil's fall. In the year before the British invasion of Java, working out of Malacca as an intelligence-gathering agent rather than yet a governor, Raffles built a network of Malay informants and allies along both coasts of Sumatra to outflank Dutch control of the Strait, and Siak's own ruling family, represented in Raffles' surviving correspondence by a Tengku Pangeran acting as envoy, supplied him with local intelligence and diplomatic backing in exchange for the promise, only partly kept, of British protection against Dutch reprisal. It was a smaller, quieter transaction than what Raffles would go on to attempt at Palembang a year later, but it followed exactly the same logic: cultivate a Sumatran court's grievance against the Dutch, trade paper promises for real information, and let the British flag arrive, if it arrived at all, only after the groundwork had already been laid by someone else's risk.

In 1945, almost immediately after the proclamation of Indonesian independence, Syarif Kasim II became one of the very first Sumatran rulers to pledge his sultanate's loyalty to the fledgling Republic, and backed the pledge with something no other ruler matched in scale: thirteen million guilders of his own treasury, donated outright to fund the republican government and its army in the chaos of revolution. It was a reversal, as our guide pointed out with evident pride, of the entire traditional logic of Malay kingship, in which subjects pledge loyalty upward to a sovereign. Here the sovereign pledged everything downward, to a republic that did not yet exist in any settled form, and by doing so ensured that his own sultanate's memory survived the revolution with dignity rather than being erased by it. He is remembered today, correctly, not merely as a local sultan but as a national hero, his name carried by Riau's main airport and by a state Islamic university, a rare case of a Malay ruler who read the direction of history early enough, and generously enough, to be honoured by the very republic that made his throne obsolete.

Photographs inside the palace make that reversal legible in a way no plaque could. In one gilt-framed portrait near the entrance, Sultan Syarif Kasim II and his sultanah stand beside Sukarno and one of his wives, all four dressed in the unmistakable idiom of the new republic, songkok and batik and a plain white peci rather than a single crown or medal between them, a family photograph, more or less, of the nation the sultan had just finished bankrolling into existence. A few steps further on hangs an older, formal studio portrait from the Dutch years: the same household, but husband and wife this time in full colonial-era royal military dress, epaulettes, a chest of medals, a ceremonial sword resting against a European-cut uniform that could have been tailored in The Hague, the young sultan seated stiffly beside his consort in an image plainly meant to be read by a Dutch resident rather than by his own subjects.

Set side by side, one European-martial and self-consciously aristocratic, the other Indonesian-nationalist and deliberately plain, the two photographs explain Syarif Kasim's later choice better than any single fact about the thirteen million guilders: here was a man who had spent his whole life being photographed in the costume of whichever power he needed to be legible to, and who read, correctly, which costume the twentieth century was actually going to reward.

Inside the throne room itself, a small crowd of mannequins in black songket and stiff formal dress stand frozen mid-audience around a huge gilt-framed mirror and a crystal chandelier, blue curtains looped back in heavy swags on either side, arranged with the same hushed, roped-off reverence we had already met once before in Pagaruyung's own royal hall, two courts, one matrilineal and one patrilineal, a world apart in custom, converging on an almost identical way of staging royal authority for a camera. Outside in the grounds, past a small pink-brick sentry post still labelled Pos Opas, the palace police post, in stencilled government signage, sits the sultan's own iron boat, rusted now and raised on a concrete plinth under a corrugated awning, the vessel Syarif Kasim once used to survey his own river and his own people directly, rather than through the layered bureaucracy every other ruler on this trip seemed to govern through, a sultan who, by every account, actually wanted to see the land he was about to give away.

Raja Kecil's own rise, well over two centuries earlier, is in miniature exactly the kind of strategic identity-making Leonard Andaya finds threaded right through the Straits' history. Raised and backed, by most accounts, among the Minangkabau, he pressed his claim to Johor's throne not as an outsider but as blood heir to its murdered sultan, and when Malay chiefs eventually turned against him and drove him out of Johor itself, he fell back on Minangkabau support to found Siak as a rival court instead, trading one identity for another as the political arithmetic of the moment demanded. It was precisely this kind of dispute, Andaya argues, that hardened Minangkabau and Malay into more sharply bounded, competing categories than either had been a century before, ethnicity here operating less as ancestry than as a claim staked, defended, and occasionally abandoned according to where power could actually be found.

CROSSING TO THE MALAY LOWLANDS

CHAPTER SIX: THE RIVER THAT KEEPS ITS SECRETS