Laying of the first stone of Meusigit Raja (1879) was an event in the history of Aceh recorded by Jongejan in Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu.
Date and Context
The event is dated to 1879.
Significance
The event is recorded by Jongejan as part of the broader historical narrative of Aceh and the Atjeh conflict period. It illustrates the complex interplay of local Atjehers politics, Dutch colonial administration, and the religious and military leadership that shaped the region’s history.
Account from Verstege’s Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk (1886)
Verstege’s picture, from Kielstra and the Koloniaal Verslag, is the amplest of the day: on 9 October 1879 the first stone-laying of the new Atjehsche missigit (mosque), to be built in the vicinity of Kota Radja, took place — the foundations being laid by generaal van der Heyden in the presence of a large number of prominent heads of Groot-Atjeh and of princes and regents of the vasal states, called to the ceremony by him, and also in the presence of a company of more than 6,000 Atjehers, who after the laying took part in the kendoerie-feast (the prayer-meal which could not be omitted according to land custom); the ceremony and the feast came to an end without any disturbance — “een welsprekend bewijs, dat het Atjehsche volk zelf, zich toen als feitelijk onderworpen beschouwde” (“an eloquent proof that the Atjehsche people themselves then regarded themselves as actually subdued”). Verstege sets it out in a triad: “Ruim zes duizend Atjehers vreedzaam vereenigd op de plek waar enkele jaren geleden het heiligdom stond, dat zij met heldenmoed en doodsverachting tegen ons hadden verdedigd… vreedzaam vereenigd binnen onze toen zoo uitgestrekte linien, bij het aloude, doch inmiddels ook voor hen onherkenbaar geworden verblijf hunner Vorsten… binnen onze liniën, en meer die ons toen — als den sterkere, als hun meester erkenden” (“More than six thousand Atjehers peacefully gathered on the spot where a few years before stood the sanctuary that they had defended against us with heroism and contempt of death… peacefully gathered within our then so extended lines, by the old, but in the meanwhile unrecognisable to them, residence of their Princes… within our lines, and more who then recognised us as the stronger, as their master”). He notes the diminishing argument, too: the precautions that were taken against treachery were sometimes adduced to belittle the gathering — to which he replies that the opposite of such precautions would have made the commanders guilty of the worst negligence, a naivety comparable only to that of those who in September 1885 approved the great precautions at The Hague against the social-democrats. (On the mosque built on the site see Baiturrahman Grand Mosque.)
See Also
Source
Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu, by J. Jongejans, Oud-Resident van het Gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden, with a foreword by Dr. H. Colijn (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 166.
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 63-64. OCR: DLP-158.