De Vink was a Dutch archaeologist and photographer active in Atjeh in the years of the definitive peace, who made his headquarters at Loh Semaweu and there traced the oudheden (antiquities) and holy graves of the country. He had earlier served for years as assistant to kapitein Van Erp in the restoration of the Borobudur in Java, and in Atjeh he continued the same technical work: he took photographs of the antiquities and made impressions of the inscriptions in stijfselpapier (starch-paper), which he sent to Leiden to be deciphered and studied by Professor Snouck Hurgronje.
The excursion with Moens, November 1913
Moens, who came into contact with De Vink at Loh Semaweu in November 1913 during his journey through Atjeh, joined him on an excursion to one of the holy graves. The party went first forty-five minutes by the tram from Loh Semaweu to Geudong and then more than an hour on foot, up to the ankles in the mud, but along an old watercourse, to the plain of Koeta Kareuëng. There De Vink showed his guest the grave of a queen of Pasé, dated 1500 A.D. (1500 n. C.), with head and foot stones of white marble bearing Arabic inscriptions; on the reverse of the stones Hindu inscriptions were found. Because no marble occurs in Atjeh, the material testified that the stones had originally been brought from India, and the monument with its double inscriptions marked the transition of the country to Islam.
Significance
De Vink is significant as the field-worker who, in the years immediately after the pacificatie, opened the antiquities of the Atjehnese north coast to scholarly investigation, transmitting the material — photographs and starch-paper impressions of the inscriptions — to Snouck Hurgronje at Leiden. His former assistantship under kapitein Van Erp at the Borobudur restoration placed him in the first generation of Netherlands-Indies monument conservators, and his presence at Loh Semaweu, where Moens recorded that a real vredes-werk (peace-work) was under hand in Atjeh, marked the extension of that conservation work from Java to the newly pacified sultanate.
See Also
- Koeta Kareuëng
- Pasé
- Lho’ Seumawe
- Geudong Concession
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- Moens’ journey through Atjeh (November 1913)
- Pacificatie van Atjeh
- 1913
Source
Reisindrukken van Atjeh, door W. Moens, oud-luitenant ter zee (Amsterdam: Jacob van Campen, 1914), pp. 17–18. OCR-filename: 20260716_140310_DLP-99-Reisindrukken_van_Atjeh_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.