Atjeh silk ikat weaving was the production of silk cloth with ikat (resist-dye) patterned warps in Atjeh — a craft recorded in Prof. T. J. Bezemer’s *Indonesische Kunstnijverheid* (1933) through two specific plates (65 and 66) described as silk tissues with ikatted warps from Atjeh, and placed by Bezemer within the broader Indonesian *ikatten* tradition. The use of imported silk — explicitly noted in the four-language caption of plate 65 — suggests the integration of the sultanate’s textile craft into the wider Indian Ocean silk trade, and connects the Atjeh silk-ikat tradition to the late-colonial import of silk yarn from Singapore and Penang documented in F. A. Wagner’s *Sierkunst in Indonesië* (1949).
The plates and their four-language captions
The Bezemer atlas records two specific items of Atjeh silk ikat weaving on page 49:
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Plate 65: Geïmporteerd zijden weefsel. Atjeh, N. Sumatra. — “Imported silk tissue. Atjeh, North Sumatra.”
- English: Tissue of imported Silk Ikatted on the Warp. Acheh.
- French: Tissu de soie importée. Avec ikat sur la chaine. Atcheh. — “Tissue of imported silk. With ikat on the warp. Atcheh.”
- German: Gewebe von importierter Seide. Ikattiert auf der Kette. Atjeh. — “Tissue of imported silk. Ikatted on the warp. Atjeh.”
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Plate 66: Zijden ikatweefsel. Atjeh. — “Silk ikat-tissue. Atjeh.”
- English: Silk Tissue with Ikatted Warp Strokes. Acheh.
- French: Tissu de soie avec des bandes à l’ikat sur la chaine. Atcheh. — “Silk tissue with ikat-bands on the warp. Atcheh.”
- German: Seiden Gewebe, mit ikattierten Kettenstreifen. Atjeh. — “Silk tissue, with ikatted warp-stripes. Atjeh.”
The four-language captions of plates 65 and 66 are the most technically informative of the Atjeh-plate captions in the Bezemer atlas. Plate 65 documents a textile made from imported silk yarn ikatted over the whole warp, while plate 66 documents a textile in which the ikat is applied only to strokes (English) / bandes (French) / Kettenstreifen (German) of the warp, alternating with non-ikatted warp-strokes. The juxtaposition is comparative: it shows two ways in which Atjeh weavers applied the ikat technique to silk warp, and so documents the range of the Atjeh silk-ikat tradition in the late colonial period.
The ikatten technique
Ikat (from the Malay-Indonesian verb mengikat, “to tie” or “to bind”) is a resist-dyeing technique in which the yarns — most commonly the warp (ketting in Dutch, chaine in French) — are tightly bound at intervals before dyeing, so that the bound sections resist the dye and produce a pattern when the yarns are woven. Bezemer’s Inleiding (§ B. Weven, pp. 5–7) describes the general *ikatten* process: the weaver takes bundles of warp-threads, wraps them locally with fibre-strips (vezelstrooken) so that the dye cannot penetrate the wrapped places, dips the bundles in the dye-bath, and so obtains a warp with a resist-dyed pattern. When the warp is mounted on the loom and a plain weft is woven through it, the pattern appears sharply on the resulting cloth.
Bezemer notes that the technique is applied, in the Indonesian archipelago, principally to the warp: “Bijna overal worden alleen de ketting- of scheringdraden geikat” — “Almost everywhere only the warp- or schering-threads are ikatted.” The weft-ikat variant is rare; Bezemer cites only the example of the désa Tenganan on Bali. The double-ikat variant — in which both warp and weft are ikatted — is even rarer; the Tenganan example is, in Bezemer’s account, the principal Indonesian case. The Atjeh silk ikats of plates 65 and 66 are both warp-ikats, and the technique is therefore the standard warp-ikat variant of the ikatten process, applied specifically to silk. Bezemer also notes that the aesthetic appeal of the ikatten cloth lies, in part, in the soft blending of the colours at the edges of the resist-dyed pattern — a bekoring (charm) rather than a defect.
Imported silk
The explicit mention of “imported silk” (geïmporteerd zijde, soie importée, importierter Seide) for plate 65 is significant. It indicates that the silk used in Atjeh ikat weaving was not (or not only) locally produced, but was brought in from outside the sultanate. The fact is consistent with what is documented in Wagner’s 1949 account of Atjeh silk yarn import from Singapore and Penang, according to which Atjeh weavers in the late colonial period imported their silk yarn from the British trading ports of Singapore and Penang rather than drawing on a local silk-rearing industry. The Bezemer plate 65 is, in this sense, the photographic documentation of an Atjeh textile made from imported Singapore-or-Penang silk, ikatted on the warp, and woven in Atjeh — a composite origin that the four-language caption compresses into the single word imported / importée / importierter.
The use of imported silk also places the Atjeh textile craft in direct relation to the Indian Ocean silk trade — most likely from China or from India via the same Indian Ocean trade routes that brought the *soeasa* alloy and the gemstones that figured in the Soury embassy’s jewel negotiations of 1641. Atjeh’s craft tradition thus drew on imported raw materials and transformed them through local technique into a recognisable product.
Provenance: the Koloniaal Instituut
The Verzameling / Collection / Sammlung appendix to the Bezemer atlas (pp. 169–170) records that plates 65 and 66 are among the plates whose photographs were supplied by the Koloniaal Instituut’s Afd. Volkenkunde in Amsterdam. The textiles were therefore part of the institute’s Atjeh collection in 1933 — a collection built up through half a century of Dutch colonial collecting in Atjeh, beginning with the Atjeh War period of 1873–1904 and continuing through the pacification and civil administration of the residency. Like the Atjeh loom of plate 62, the silk ikats of plates 65 and 66 were collected from Atjeh, transported to Amsterdam, catalogued by the Koloniaal Instituut, and photographed for the Bezemer atlas. The two plates together preserve, in 1933, a photographic record of two specific historical objects — two Atjeh silk ikats — at the moment of their fullest late-colonial documentation.
Atjeh silk ikat in the Wagner 1949 account
Wagner’s *Sierkunst in Indonesië* of 1949 places the Atjeh silk-ikat tradition within the broader Sumatran silk-weaving context. Wagner notes that Atjeh silk cultivation was “waarschijnlijk al zeer oud” (probably already very old) — a remark that, read alongside Bezemer’s documentation of imported silk in plate 65, suggests that the Atjeh silk-weaving tradition combined local cultivation with imported yarn, depending on the availability and price of each. The Wagner account is the principal Dutch printed source for the Atjeh silk-culture tradition and for the modern trade in silk yarn for Atjeh weaving, and is the source on which the present AcehWiki cluster of Atjeh-silk entries (in addition to the Bezemer documentation) draws.
Significance
For Atjeh’s history, the silk ikat weaving tradition attests to the sultanate’s place in the wider Indian Ocean textile economy — a producer of ikat-patterned cloth from imported silk, alongside its better-known pepper trade. The Bezemer plates of 1933 document the existence of an Atjeh silk-ikat craft tradition at the moment of European colonial cataloguing, even if the technique itself must be considerably older. The two plates together document the range of the Atjeh silk-ikat tradition — full warp-ikat (plate 65) and banded warp-ikat (plate 66) — and place Atjeh within the broader Sumatran silk-weaving tradition that Wagner would survey sixteen years later in 1949.
See Also
- Acheh
- Indonesische Kunstnijverheid (Bezemer 1933)
- Sierkunst in Indonesië
- T. J. Bezemer
- Koninklijke Vereeniging “Koloniaal Instituut”
- Atjeh weefgetouw
- Atjeh goldsmithing (soeasa technique)
- Atjeh sirih-schotel
- Atjeh silk culture
- Atjeh silk yarn import from Singapore and Penang
- Ikatten
- Sumatra
- Singapore
- Penang
- Pieter Soury’s mission to Atjeh (1641)
- Aceh War
- 1873
- 1904
- 1641
- 1933
- 1949
Sources
Indonesische Kunstnijverheid. Platen-Atlas met Inleiding van Prof. T. J. Bezemer (‘s-Gravenhage: N.V. tot Exploitatie van het Maandblad “Nederl-Indië, Oud en Nieuw”; ten Hagen’s Drukkerij en Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., 15 October 1933), plate 65 and plate 66 (p. 49), Inleiding § B pp. 5–7 (on the ikatten technique), and Verzameling appendix (p. 169). Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, LS 5411.
Sierkunst in Indonesië, by F. A. Wagner, Insulinde — Serie Handleidingen voor de Kennis van Indonesië, Vol. VI (Groningen, Batavia: J. B. Wolters’ Uitgevers-Maatschappij N.V., 1949), p. 41 (on Atjeh silk cultivation), p. 55–56 (on the idja silk cloth with gold- and silver-thread decoration), p. 56 (on Atjeh women’s wide trousers as a typically Atjehnese garment), and p. 57 (on the modern trade in silk yarn for Atjeh weaving).