Mr. L. J. C. van Es was a Dutch engineer to whom Snouck Hurgronje acknowledges, in Vol. I of The Achehnese, his debt for the “full explanatory notes” accompanying the plate of the Achehnese dwelling-house. The plate, reproduced in the work, was designed to show clearly the principal features of the Achehnese house, and Van Es’s notes supplied the technical commentary without which the drawing could not have been properly understood.
The Achehnese dwelling-house, as described by Snouck Hurgronje in the chapter to which the plate belongs, is a structure of considerable ingenuity, raised on piles and built throughout of timber, bamboo and attap, with a complex internal arrangement suited to the peculiarities of Achehnese domestic life. The frame is put together without nails, the various parts being fastened by wooden pins and rattan lashings; the dwelling is divided into an open verandah (seuramoe likòt and seuramoe keu), a middle apartment (seuramoe teungoh) used for receiving visitors, and an inner portion (rumoh inòng) reserved for the women. The skeleton of the house and its most conspicuous features — the high-pitched roof, the prolongation of the gable-ends, the open platform beneath the floor, the notched-log ladder by which the dwelling is entered — are best apprehended from a careful drawing than from any verbal description; and it was precisely such a drawing, made by Mr. M. Donk, that Van Es’s notes were intended to elucidate.
The brief acknowledgment places Van Es in that numerous class of Dutch colonial engineers and officials whose technical knowledge of the Netherlands Indies — its architecture, agriculture, public works and material culture — was placed at the disposal of the metropolitan scholar. Without their assistance, works like The Achehnese, which combined ethnographic observation with technical precision, could not have been produced. Van Es’s contribution is the more valuable because the Achehnese house, in the form in which Snouck Hurgronje and his collaborators recorded it, has since been much altered or replaced under the pressure of war, modernisation and reconstruction.
Apart from this single mention, Van Es does not appear further in The Achehnese. His name is preserved in the work, however, as that of the technical authority responsible for one of its most useful illustrations.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
Mr. L. J. C. van Es was a Dutch engineer to whom Snouck Hurgronje acknowledges, in Vol. I of The Achehnese, his debt for the “full explanatory notes” accompanying the plate of the Achehnese dwelling-house. The plate, reproduced in the work, was designed to show clearly the principal features of the Achehnese house, and Van Es’s notes supplied the technical commentary without which the drawing could not have been properly understood.
The Achehnese dwelling-house, as described by Snouck Hurgronje in the chapter to which the plate belongs, is a structure of considerable ingenuity, raised on piles and built throughout of timber, bamboo and attap, with a complex internal arrangement suited to the peculiarities of Achehnese domestic life. The frame is put together without nails, the various parts being fastened by wooden pins and rattan lashings; the dwelling is divided into an open verandah (seuramoe likòt and seuramoe keu), a middle apartment (seuramoe teungoh) used for receiving visitors, and an inner portion (rumoh inòng) reserved for the women. The skeleton of the house and its most conspicuous features — the high-pitched roof, the prolongation of the gable-ends, the open platform beneath the floor, the notched-log ladder by which the dwelling is entered — are best apprehended from a careful drawing than from any verbal description; and it was precisely such a drawing, made by Mr. M. Donk, that Van Es’s notes were intended to elucidate.
The brief acknowledgment places Van Es in that numerous class of Dutch colonial engineers and officials whose technical knowledge of the Netherlands Indies — its architecture, agriculture, public works and material culture — was placed at the disposal of the metropolitan scholar. Without their assistance, works like The Achehnese, which combined ethnographic observation with technical precision, could not have been produced. Van Es’s contribution is the more valuable because the Achehnese house, in the form in which Snouck Hurgronje and his collaborators recorded it, has since been much altered or replaced under the pressure of war, modernisation and reconstruction.
Apart from this single mention, Van Es does not appear further in The Achehnese. His name is preserved in the work, however, as that of the technical authority responsible for one of its most useful illustrations.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.