Sumatra • Chapter Six

THE RIVER THAT KEEPS ITS SECRETS

Along the Batang Hari: from the monastic university of Muaro Jambi to sunken flying boats, burned oilfields, and the defiance of Sultan Thaha.

By Tan Wee Cheng

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The British colonial scholar Richard Olaf Winstedt, surveying the whole sweep of Malay history from the vantage of Malayan philology, once located the true centre of gravity of the Malay world not on the Peninsula at all but here, on this side of the Strait: “The Malay heartland is not merely a geographic coast, but a cultural space born along the great river arteries of Eastern Sumatra — Palembang, Jambi, and Indragiri — before flowing out to shape the Malay Peninsula.” Jambi arrives first as a river. Sultan Thaha Airport sits close enough to the Batang Hari that the descent gives you the whole province in a single window-seat glance: a wide brown ribbon of water, Sumatra's greatest river, curling through jungle and rubber groves on its way to the Malacca Strait, exactly as it has curled for the fourteen centuries during which it has served, by turns, as trade route, pilgrimage road, battlefield, and, as I would learn on my first afternoon in the city, a grave.

Jambi's deep history is a story of eclipse and re-emergence played out along this single waterway. The Chinese Buddhist monk I-Tsing, passing through in 671 CE on his way to study at Nalanda in India, recorded the kingdom then centred here, Melayu, as a flourishing rival to Sriwijaya at Palembang, one of two major powers contesting control of the Strait's trade. The rivalry did not last; by around 692 CE Sriwijaya had absorbed Melayu outright, and I-Tsing himself, passing back through on a later journey, registered the change in his own writing. Melayu spent the following centuries as a subordinate territory of Palembang's empire. That arrangement held until Sriwijaya itself began to buckle.

The decisive blow landed in the eleventh century, when a Chola fleet, sent by the South Indian Tamil dynasty then at the height of its own naval and temple-building ambitions, sailed around Sumatra and struck Palembang directly, shattering the naval supremacy on which Sriwijaya's whole trading empire depended, a campaign I would find told in far greater detail, in stone rather than in summary, once I reached Palembang itself. Melayu re-emerged from the wreckage as its own independent power, the Dharmasraya kingdom, inheriting much of the cultural and commercial weight Sriwijaya could no longer hold alone. It became, in effect, less a rival than a successor: the vessel through which Malay-Buddhist statecraft and language passed forward into the centuries that followed, right down to the royal genealogies that Malay courts across the Strait, Melaka, Johor, Perak, would later trace back through Sang Sapurba to this same stretch of river.

Jambi drew Raffles' attention too, later and more briefly. Governing Bencoolen on Sumatra's west coast from 1818 to 1824, and increasingly boxed in by a resurgent Dutch presence on the Strait's eastern side, Raffles came to see Jambi, together with Palembang and Siak, as the last available route to an overland British foothold spanning the island, and pursued treaties with Jambi's own rulers aimed at securing an inland trade corridor and a share of its pepper and rattan. Almost none of it survived contact with London's own priorities: the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, carving the Malay world neatly along the Strait, nullified most of what Raffles had signed on Sumatra's eastern rivers and left Jambi, like Siak and Palembang before it, inside a Dutch sphere his own despatches had spent years arguing against.

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We spent a morning at Muaro Jambi, a Buddhist temple complex stretching twelve kilometres along the Batang Hari, and the scale of it is genuinely difficult to hold in the mind while walking it. Between the seventh and thirteenth centuries this was, by most scholarly accounts, spoken of in the same breath as Nalanda itself: a monastic university city where I-Tsing and pilgrims like him paused for months or years to master Sanskrit and Buddhist philosophy before continuing on to India, a community of monks that once numbered, by his own account, in the thousands. Walking among the menapo, the low earthen mounds still half-swallowed by rubber and durian groves, unexcavated after all these centuries, produces a peculiar vertigo: you are aware, at every step, that you are seeing perhaps a tenth of what is actually here.

At Candi Tinggi, the tallest structure on site, you can still read the original scale of the place in the way the mound dominates the surrounding tree line. At Candi Gumpung, best restored of them all, archaeologists once lifted a bronze statue of Prajnaparamita, the Buddhist goddess of transcendent wisdom, from the very courtyard where I stood. At Candi Kembar Batu, the “twin stone temple,” its layout a courtyard of subsidiary buildings rather than a single dominant mound, excavators found inscribed clay tablets and votive seals bearing Buddhist mantras, the kind of find that shifts a site's classification from devotional complex to working monastic school. And at Candi Kedaton, the largest mound of all, almost nothing has been excavated at all; it stands jungle-covered and raw, less a restored monument than a promise of everything still buried beneath it.

The grounds themselves were immaculately kept, grass trimmed, paths swept clean, even though the explanatory panels were still absent and no maps guided a visitor between the mounds, a curious mismatch of care and incompleteness that felt, on reflection, less like neglect than quiet preparation. As of late 2025, Indonesian officials were still describing Muaro Jambi's long-running UNESCO World Heritage bid as a work in progress: the site has sat on the tentative list since 2009, and local authorities have in recent years leaned instead on festivals, cultural tours and community-led programming to build the case for the recognition that has so far eluded it, hopeful this quieter groundwork will eventually tip a formal nomination through.

Standing at Kembar Batu with a scholarly caveat still ringing in my ears, that the precise identification of I-Tsing's “Melayu” with this exact site is something later historians inferred rather than something his own writing states outright, I found the caveat almost beside the point. Whatever the monk actually meant by the word, this was, beyond serious doubt, a place where Buddhism travelled and lived for centuries before moving on, leaving behind a religious and intellectual weight far heavier than the modest tourist infrastructure currently built to hold it.

That afternoon, at the Museum Perjuangan Rakyat Jambi, I encountered the single most unexpectedly moving story of the entire trip, and it involved neither a temple nor a sultan but an aircraft. In 1948, as Dutch forces pressed their “Second Police Action” against the young Republic, the Jambi Regional Defence Council chartered a war-surplus Catalina flying boat, registered RI-005, from a former Royal Australian Air Force pilot named R.R. Cobley, a man whose exact loyalties the historical record leaves tantalisingly unresolved: the Dutch accused him of running opium and diamonds for the Republic between Jambi's jungle airstrip and Singapore, and one unverified Dutch account even claims he once flew the exiled communist leader Muso back into Java. Adventurer, smuggler, gun-runner, freedom fighter: the museum's own display did not attempt to resolve the question, and I found I did not want it resolved either.

On the night of 28–29 December 1948, taking off from the Batang Hari, RI-005 struck the submerged wreckage of a barge that locals had deliberately sunk across the river to block Dutch gunboats from reaching inland Jambi, the very obstacle meant to protect the town having brought down the aircraft meant to defend it. Cobley and his young Indonesian co-pilot and mechanic, John Londa, went down with the plane. Divers later recovered fragments, an engine, sections of wing, now displayed beside a full-scale replica bearing both of the aircraft's identities at once, its Australian civil registration VH-BDP painted on one side, RI-005, the number it died flying for Indonesia, on the other. The same river that once carried Buddhist pilgrims toward Nalanda a thousand years earlier, I thought, standing before those salvaged fragments, is still quietly keeping secrets at the bottom of its own current, indifferent to whether the history it swallows is spiritual or military, sacred or merely brave.

The same museum held a second, harsher story from that same war, one year on from the Catalina's loss. On 28 December 1949, in an operation the Dutch called Burung Murai, troops dropped into Jambi's oil-producing heartland at Kenali Asam, Tempino and Bajubang, aiming to seize the wells before the Republic could destroy them. The Indonesian commander on the ground, Captain Sumardi, answered with fire rather than surrender: on the order of Lieutenant R. Mansur, a siren sounded the command to burn, and Kenali Asam's oil fields went up, by the museum's own description, into a sea of flame that trapped Dutch troops as they landed. The burning did not stop at the wells. Jambi City itself was put to the torch on Sumardi's orders, rubber stockpiles heaped around the market alleys and set alight along with shops and the town's power station, a fire that cost some 7,500 Chinese and Indian traders their premises and consumed even Benteng, the old Jambi palace, burned down under Lieutenant I Suhaimi and Sergeant Major Ishak Achmad. It was, at bottom, the same logic as the barge sunk across the Batang Hari to block Dutch gunboats a year earlier, carried this time to its most total conclusion: better a city and an oilfield in ashes than either handed over intact.

Jambi's last sultan, Thaha Saifuddin, supplies the province's other great story of defiance, and it is a considerably longer one. Enthroned in 1855, he reviewed the treaties his predecessors had signed with the Dutch, found them a wholesale surrender of sovereignty, and simply refused to renew them. The Dutch invaded in 1858 and occupied much of the sultanate's territory, but rather than submit, Thaha withdrew into the interior and kept his claim to the throne alive for nearly half a century from there, forming a resistance force trained partly by instructors from Aceh, appealing even to the Ottoman Empire for arms, and allying with resistance leaders elsewhere in Sumatra, including the Batak chief Sisingamangaraja.

Flag of the Jambi Sultanate

Sultan Thaha Saifuddin, Jambi's last sultan and Indonesian national hero.

The Jambi Museum's own account goes further still, crediting Thaha with a personal visit to the Ottoman court to plead his case, and displaying, as proof of the resulting friendship, a medal said to have been conferred on him in Istanbul. The claim sits uneasily beside every other record of a ruler who spent nearly fifty years directing his resistance from deep in the Jambi interior without, so far as most historians can establish, ever leaving Sumatra at all, but the museum was not about to let a small matter of travel logistics stand between a national hero and a good medal.

In the pre-dawn hours of 27 April 1904, Dutch troops finally surrounded his camp at Betung Bedarah; woken by gunfire, the eighty-eight-year-old sultan abandoned his firearm for a keris and plunged directly into the fighting alongside two lieutenants, and was killed in the clash that followed, a nine-decade life ending, characteristically, on the attack rather than in retreat. His royal regalia, the Keris Siginjai, taken to Batavia after his death, has sat in the National Museum in Jakarta ever since; what stands in Jambi today is a monument and a replica, but the kris remains, in symbolic terms, still very much the province's own: reproduced on its flag, its coat of arms, and brought out at every ceremonial inauguration since independence to be placed, briefly, at the waist of whichever figure the province recognises as bearing its authority.

Thaha's death did not end the resistance; it passed it to the next generation. Raden Mattaher, a relative of the sultan and by most accounts his most feared field commander, fought on for three more years after Betung Bedarah, earning the nickname Singo Kumpeh, the Lion of Kumpeh, after sinking a Dutch vessel on the Batang Hari near Kumpeh and turning himself, in the process, into the most wanted man in the residency. He was cornered before dawn on 10 September 1907 at Muaro Jambi, asked to surrender, and shot down refusing. He is buried today among the old royal graves on the shore of Lake Sipin, a short drive from the same temple mounds I had walked that same morning.

We ate, that evening, tempoyak and pindang side by side, and the pairing said as much about Jambi's relationship with its river as any museum could, and as much again about how little of Indonesia's actual culinary range ever travels beyond its own province. Tempoyak, durian fermented for days until its sweetness sours into something closer to fish sauce, cooked down with chilli, turmeric and river fish into a thick, funky curry, is a dish of transformation and preservation, a way of using surplus fruit from trees that line the Batang Hari's banks in a form that keeps.

Pindang, by contrast, a clear, tamarind-soured fish soup bright with lemongrass and turmeric, is a dish of freshness and clarity, a quick showcase for the river's catfish in its purest form. Neither dish owes anything to Padang cooking, and neither has ever needed to: both turn up across Sumatra and into Malaysia, but the way they're cooked here carries the same Melayu river logic as everything else in Jambi, quietly overshadowed, like so much of regional Indonesian cooking, by the outsized fame of one highland province's food. Between them, fermented depth and clean acidity, they seemed to me to summarise the whole logic of a place built entirely around the patient, endlessly productive fact of moving water.

THE RIVER THAT KEEPS ITS SECRETS

CHAPTER SEVEN: PALEMBANG, WHERE AN EMPIRE RULED THE SEA