The Chinese sutler was a recurring figure of the Dutch outpost life of Groot-Atjeh, keeping a hut beside each post from which the garrison was supplied with small comforts, and described at length by G. B. Hooijer in his account of Toengkoeb.
At Toengkoeb
Outside the guard position on the high part beneath the flagstaff at Toengkoeb stood the hut in which the Chinese lived die de bezetting voorzag van kleine geriefelijkheden en versnaperingen voor de maaltijden, als bier, tabak, pijpen, blikjes met verduurzaamde levensmiddelen, vruchten en toespijzen (side-dishes accompanying rice) — who supplied the garrison with small comforts and delicacies for their meals: beer, tobacco, pipes, tins of preserved food, fruit and side-dishes.
Hooijer’s portrait employs the racial caricature conventional in Dutch colonial writing of the period. He described the sutler standing in his dirty-white Chinese trousers behind baskets of anything but fresh wares, praising them in half-intelligible lisped pidgin Malay (brabbel-Maleisch) to the sun-roasted soldiers. As his countrymen had always done in the time of the Dutch marches into the deepest part of enemy territory, he risked zijn parasietenleventje for the sake of a small profit and a pipe of opium; with unsurpassed shrewdness he guessed the needs of his clientèle, and with unsurpassed zeal turned over his little capital of a few dollars and wore out the leather of his sandals fetching new stock for the dimes and cents received in exchange.
Hooijer noted that the hut lay outside the ijzerdraadversperring, and was therefore anything but secure against a bold Achehnese marauder.
At other posts
At Lam Soet the little house of the Chinese merchant lay outside the earthen rampart together with the bathroom. Chinese also appear in Hooijer’s description of the river traffic at Anagaloeng under General van der Heijden: passing continually with soldiers and native women over the float-bridge, and manning the great Chinese barges that carried the sick down to the Kraton.
See Also
Source
De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh, door G. B. Hooijer, Gep. Luit.-Kolonel O. I. Leger, met 24 platen (Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn; Batavia: G. Kolff & Co., 1897). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Centrale Boekerij, Amsterdam. OCR-filename: 20260719_140140_DLP-134-De_verlaten_posten_in_Groot_Atjeh_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt, pp. 22, 24, 48, 49.