Medan offers whiff of the past amid traffic jams

Medan offers whiff of the past amid traffic jams

Peter Janssen, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Medan, North Sumatra

Medan's Tip Top Restaurant has plenty of "tempo dulu" --
Indonesian for "times past" or "nostalgia" -- on the menu.

Its canopied frontage, lazy ceiling fans, wood-finished decor
and even the waiters' uniforms have changed little since the
restaurant was opened in 1939 and quickly became a favorite
hangout for Dutch planters and their wives.

"They even still have Wiener Cafe on the menu," said Nancy
Janssen-Currier, my mother, on a recent visit.

Back in the mid-1950s, when my father worked as an assistant
manager on a tobacco plantation in the Batang Kwis district
outside Medan, my mother would travel to the city twice a month
to shop.

Wiener Cafe -- a cup of coffee with vanilla ice cream mixed in
-- at the Tip Top Restaurant was always her first port of call.

Medan was built amid vast plantations of tobacco, rubber and
palm oil that transformed it from a simple kampong of 200
villagers in 1860 into one of the richest cities in the Dutch
East Indies by 1920.

The vicinity's rich soil, abundant rainfall and sunshine
attracted investors in plantations from the Netherlands, Germany,
Britain, Belgium, France, Poland and the United States, forming a
cosmopolitan mix that earned the city the exaggerated nickname
"Paris of Sumatra".

The notorious Mata Hari (real name Margaretha Geertruida
Zelle) lived in Medan between 1900-1903, staying at the Hotel De
Boer (now Dharma Deli Hotel) before becoming an "exotic dancer"
in Europe. Mata Hari, (literally "Eye of the Day", i.e. the Sun)
was executed as a German spy in 1917.

Besides Europeans, Medan also drew hundreds of thousands of
coolies and opportunity-seekers from Java, China and India.

Thousands of them died building the North Sumatran railroad
and working under the harsh conditions that typified the
plantations, best captured in Madelon Lulofs' two books Rubber
and Coolie.

A few, however, prospered. One such man, Tjong A. Fie, became
one of Indonesia's richest overseas Chinese, who by the time of
his death in 1920 was the proud owner of 20 Medan plantations,
employing many Europeans at his companies.

Fie's magnificent Chinese mansion can still be seen on Jl.
Ahmad Yani, a short walk from the Tip Top Restaurant.

"There were 300,000 Chinese who came from China to Medan,
making it the highest concentration of Chinese in Indonesia,"
said Dirk Aedsge Buiskool, a Dutch historian based in Medan whose
Indonesian wife Diana runs the Tri Jaya Wisantapermai Tour &
Travel Company (www.trijaya-travel.com.)

Buiskool, a former lecturer at the University of North
Sumatra, in 1995 penned a short book titled Tours through
historical Medan and its surroundings, in an attempt to make an
inventory of the preindependence buildings that remain in the
city, now the country's third most populous metropolis with three
million people.

The book describes 73 still-standing historic sites, including
classic examples of Dutch and British colonial, Arabic, Chinese
and even Japanese architecture.

The only contribution to Medan's skyline left behind by the
Japanese, who occupied Medan between 1942-45, was a Shinto temple
built by prisoners-of-war. Now the Medan Club, the temple served
as both a meeting place and a brothel for the Japanese military
during the war, according to Buiskool's book.

But most of Medan's surviving architecture is solid Dutch
stuff.

"You have to realize there would have never have been a Medan
without the plantations, and the Dutch started the plantations,"
said Buiskool.

Jacobus Nienhuys was the first Dutchman to set up a tobacco
plantation in the Deli region of North Sumatra in 1864. By 1889
there were over 170 tobacco plantations in the area, Deli tobacco
was world famous for the best cigar wrapper in the world and
Medan was well on its way to becoming a bustling metropolis cut
out of the wilderness.

In 1910, the Medan area started to attract rubber plantations
catering to the new fangled automobile craze, with investors
pouring in from Holland, Britain, Germany and the U.S.

Later, Belgian investors would introduce oil palm plantations
to North Sumatra with seedlings from their colony in the Congo.

"In 1949, there were about 100,000 people in Medan, including
Indonesians, Chinese, Indians and the Dutch, but there were only
a few thousand Dutch," said Buiskool.

The Dutch were finally told to leave by then president Sukarno
in 1958, at the height of tensions between the two countries over
the Irian Jaya conflict.

Remarkably, much of Medan's colonial period architecture has
been preserved, or much more so than in Jakarta, where both
Sukarno and his successor president Soeharto tore down much of
the old Dutch buildings to construct a new capital.

The preservation has been assisted by the Medan Heritage
Trust, with the backing of the local tourism industry.

"Most tourists come to North Sumatra to see Lake Toba, but the
Dutch and some others come for tempo dulu," said Pontas
Panggabean, head of North Sumatra Culture & Tourism Office.

He complained that Medan's architectural heritage continues to
be threatened by local businessmen and politicians keen to rip
down the old buildings for new projects, and by a lack of city
planning.

"The city is now developing without planning," said
Panggabean. "When tourists come here now they just complain about
the traffic and pollution."