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Medan is the provincial capital of Sumatera Utara (North Sumatera). It's a cosmopolitan city with over two milion residents, a business centre for big oil and agricultural companies. Impoerant international investments in the plantation culture had big influence on the developement of Sumatera after 1870, and medan grew from a small village into a thriving colonial city from 60.000 inhabitants in 1943.
After the independence the number of residents grew fast because of a big influx of Batak and other migrants from all over Indonesia. Nowadays Medan is by far the biggest city on Sumatera, and the fourth biggest city of the country after Jakarta, Surabaya and Bandung.
The city has little to offer. However there are certain improvements over the last years, it's hard to maintain an infrastructure for such a big and growing city. Medan 'just growed' and the water, electricity and pollution gave big problems, which need immediate attention. The city council is looking for defenate sollutuions. Lower parts of the city are more and more suffering from flood that partially occur because of deforestation in the hinterlands.
Early trade settlement
About 10,000 years ago, Neolithical hunters and collecters from the Hoa Binh-culture found their place in the swampy coastal areas around the current Medan. They left big mountains of thrown-away shells, remains of seafood they ate. These mountains of shells give one of the few intriquing glitches of neolithical foundation in western Indonesia, but too bad they are all destroyed by commercial limestone burners.
Around 1000 AD, but possibly much earlier, Arabic, Indian and Chinese traders arrived to these coasts in search for important aromatic tree-harshes in the valleys and the mountains of Bukit Barisan, like kapur baruskemenyan, which Asian people used for ritual and medicinal use. In Kota Cina, the big port north of Medan, remains of an old trading outpost were found.
In the next centuries this coastal area developed several settlements along rivers. Traders and seamen, with islamic and Malay ruler which profited from the growing, profitable international trade. In the beginning of the 16th century a battle erupted between the rulers of Aru (A Malay principalty in Deli Tua near the nowadays Medan) and the principalty of Aceh (in the northern tip of Sumatera) over the rich natural recources in the hinterlands (mostly pepper).
Aru was attacked and subjected by the Acehnese in 1536. A Portuguese story tells about the attack and the battle of the queen of Aru against Aceh. This event is most likely also in the Malay (and Karo-) legend of Puteri Hijau, the Green Princes). Aru lost from Aceh early in the 17th century, which controlled the western as well as the eastern coasts of Sumatera.
Because of the developement of profitable peppertrading with the British in the 19th century, the prosperity and independence of Deli and neighboring Malay states grew enormously, however they power was kept restricted to the direct environment of the river mouths. The sultan of Deli, for example, ruled an area along the last piece of the river Deli, from the mouth to Deli Tua, no further into the hinterlands than a 'cannon shot into two directions'. The hinterlands were mainly inhabited by the Karo Batak, lead by their own independent leaders, in the four urung (village federations) lived : Sunggal (Serbanyaman), Hamperan Perak, Senembah and Sukapiring. Under influence of the ever richer Malay rulers these leaders converted to the islam in the early 19th century, and around 1870 many of the Karo from the coastal areas had already converted to the islam, and had adapted malay culture (masuk Melayu).
The success of plantations
The modern history of the Medan area starts in 1862, when a Dutch employer, Jacob Nienhuys, saw the potential of the fertile vulcanic soils in this area and persuaded the sultan of Deli to give permission for the cultivation of tobacco. The cover leaves from Deli became world-famous very soon, and from the beginning of the 19th century foreign capital flowed into the area.
This started a spectaculair transformation of the area, which was just nature before all this. It was natural rainforest and contained elephants, deers, wild pigs, tigers and other animals. Entrance to the hinterlands was pretty tough in these times: first over the river and ather that on foot over small forest paths towards the hills and over a few passes to the plateau of Karo and the Simalungun Batak areas in the southeast.
The sultan of Deli; confrontated with a non-deflatable flow of European investors, started to give concessions to areas where he didn't have anything to say about in the first place, and he so got resistance from the inhabitants of the area, they mainly were Karo. These actions lead to the Sunggal-war from 1872 until 1897, but with Dutch help, the Karo were beaten.
This area also is the most important place of the Indonesian oil-industry. In 1883, after oil was found at the surface, sultan Langkat gave Zijlker permission to do research in the Sungai-Lipan area. This investment was so successfull that the Royal Dutch Company for Exploiting Petrol (Koningklijke Nederlandsche Maatschappij tot Exploitatie van Petroleum), a predecessor of Royal Shell was founded with a starting capital of 1,1 milion Guilders in 1890.
The international world did invest here more in the pre-war period than in any place else in the Indonesian archipelago, with money from The United States, Great-Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Japan. Because the local population was little and didn't want to work for European leaders, thousands of laborers from China and India, and later alaso from Jawa and Madura were brought in. The population of the so called 'culture area' around Medan tenfoulded from 120,000 in 1880 to 1,2 milion in 1920.
The cultivation of tobacco reached it's high in 1890, followed by rubber, palmoil, sisal and tea. Against 1925 there were over 1 milion hectares of plantations, which originally were tropical rainforests. The sultans of Deli, Langkat, Serdang and Asahan - which got rich of the income of the concessions they made - built royal courts which were comparable with those on mainland Jawa and the Malay peninsula. This was ended abruptly in 1946, when young rebels started the 'socla revolution': many members of the Malay aristocracy were killed in a gruesome way.
Events after the independence disturbed the status quo in the eastern coastal areas. An important flood of Toba Batak in the rich plantation areas caused an drastic deomographical chance. From this moment the population no longer was mainly Malay, Jawanese and Chinese, but it was dominated by the Batak people from the highlands.
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