The Atjeh silk yarn import from Singapore and Penang is, in F. A. Wagner’s Sierkunst in Indonesië (1949), the modern trade in silk yarn by which the weavers of Atjeh — together with the weavers of Riouw and Sumatra’s Oostkust (East Coast) — obtained the silk yarn for their cloths. Wagner records the import in a single sentence at the end of his section on Sumatran weaving: “De zijden garens voor de weefsels van Atjeh, Riouw en Sumatra’s Oostkust worden vanuit Singapore en Penang ingevoerd.” The sentence is short, but it is the only passage in Wagner’s volume that explicitly identifies the source of the Atjeh weavers’ silk, and it places Atjeh within a regional trading network that, in the modern period, supplied the silk for the weaving traditions of the northern and eastern Sumatran coast.
The passage in Wagner
The sentence comes at the close of Wagner’s account of Sumatran weaving, immediately after his description of the idja’s of Atjeh and immediately before his account of the silk ikat (tjindé) cloths of Palembang and Banka. The placement is significant: Wagner has just described the Atjeh idja — a cloth woven in silk, with gold and silver thread, on which the anker-motief and the plang are worked — and he now notes that the silk of which the idja is woven is not Atjeh silk but imported silk. The break between the old Atjeh silk culture (see Atjeh silk culture) and the modern Atjeh silk trade is, in this sentence, made explicit: the Atjeh weaver, in the modern period, works with silk brought from across the Strait of Malacca.
The pairing of Atjeh with Riouw and Sumatra’s Oostkust in the same sentence is, in turn, a marker of the regional trading network that supplied silk to the weaving centres of northern and eastern Sumatra. The three regions — Atjeh at the northern tip of Sumatra, Riouw in the archipelago off the eastern coast, and Sumatra’s Oostkust (the East Coast residency, including Deli, Langkat, and Asahan) — together constitute the northern and eastern Sumatran coast, and the silk that supplied them came from the same two ports: Singapore and Penang.
Singapore and Penang as silk ports
Singapore and Penang were, in the period Wagner describes, the two principal British ports of the Strait of Malacca — the two “Straits Settlements” that, together with Malacca, formed the colonial base of British trade in the region. The silk that passed through Singapore and Penang came, in turn, from the broader Asian silk trade: from China (which produced the bulk of the world’s silk for export), and possibly from India and Japan. The Atjeh weavers’ silk, in this sense, was a Chinese (or pan-Asian) product, brokered through the British ports of the Strait, and purchased by Atjeh traders who brought it back across the Strait to be woven into idja’s.
The dependence of Atjeh weaving on Singapore and Penang for its silk yarn is, in turn, a marker of the integration of the Atjeh economy into the regional trading network of the late-colonial period. The old Atjeh silk culture — which Wagner describes as “waarschijnlijk al zeer oud” — had, by the period he describes, given way to a trade in which the silk came from across the Strait, and the Atjeh weaver’s craft was applied to a foreign raw material. The same integration, in the same period, is visible in the gold and silver thread of the idja’s, which Wagner notes is “tegenwoordig uitsluitend worden geïmporteerd” (today exclusively imported).
The import and the Atjeh weaving tradition
The import of silk yarn from Singapore and Penang is, in Wagner’s account, the modern condition of the Atjeh weaving tradition. The idja — the masterwork of Atjeh weaving — is, in the modern period, a cloth woven from imported silk, decorated with imported gold and silver thread, and worked by Atjeh weavers in the Atjeh motifs (anker-motief, plang) that the tradition has preserved. The craft is Atjeh; the material is not. The break between the old silk culture and the modern silk trade is, in this sense, the break between an Atjeh weaving tradition that produced its own silk and an Atjeh weaving tradition that worked with the silk of others.
The same break, in the same period, is visible in other Indonesian weaving traditions. Wagner notes, for example, that the cotton of which many Indonesian cloths are woven was, by the period he describes, increasingly imported from Europe and India, and that the area under cotton cultivation in Indonesia had shrunk correspondingly. The Atjeh silk-yarn import is, in this sense, one instance of a broader pattern: the integration of Indonesian craft traditions into a regional and global trading network, in which the raw materials came from elsewhere and the craft alone remained local.
Significance
The Atjeh silk yarn import from Singapore and Penang is, in Wagner’s account, the modern condition of the Atjeh weaving tradition — the condition in which the idja’s silk is not Atjeh silk but imported silk. Its significance in the larger history of Atjehnese decorative art is that it places the Atjeh weaving tradition, in the modern period, within a regional trading network that supplied its raw materials from across the Strait of Malacca. The break between the old Atjeh silk culture and the modern Atjeh silk trade is, in turn, the break between an Atjeh craft that produced its own materials and an Atjeh craft that worked with the materials of others — a break that, in Wagner’s account, is the condition of the idja’s modern existence.
See Also
- Idja
- Atjeh silk culture
- Singapore
- Penang
- Riouw
- Sumatra’s East Coast
- Sierkunst in Indonesië
- Acheh
- 1949
Source
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. 57.