Teukoe Tjhi Perlak — also written Teungkoe Tjhi in the older form — was the oeléebalang of Peureula (Perlak) for the half-century before 1913, and the senior member of a family whose rule over Perlak dated to the original Atjehnese settlement of the landschap about a hundred and fifty years earlier. He was a Groot-Atjeher by origin, and an ancestor had moved from Groot-Atjeh to Peureula, settled there, and made himself master of the country. By the time of his death or retirement he was, in Broersma’s judgement, the wealthiest and most far-sighted of the eastern-coast oeléebalangs, the first to see that ‘onder hun vriendschap en medewerking de oliebelangen het beste tot hun recht komen’ — that under their friendship and cooperation the oil-interests would best come into their own.
The Jong van Peusangan
As a young man Teukoe Tjhi had refused to learn the Quran — ‘meng-adji’ — and was therefore forced to leave his country. He wandered over Malakka and made his living by trade. He then settled for a time at Peudawa Rajeu near Perlak. When the Dutchmen came cruising along the coast in 1873 and 1874 and sent their negotiators ashore, ‘het avontuurlijke kind van Perlak, het jong van Peusangan’ — the adventurous child of Perlak, the young one of Peusangan — was already back, standing beside his father as a military commander. He is the Teukoe Tjhi moeda Peusangan of the war-years, the ‘krijgshaftige aanvoerder’ of the 1873 generation, and was later oeléebalang of Peureula in his own right.
His friendship with the Dutch, repeatedly pledged and maintained, often obliged him to defend his country, his people, his possessions, and even his children against the djahats — the evildoers — from elsewhere who construed his peace with the kafirs as a betrayal. Broersma remarks that the ‘scherpe, helsche, vol doodsverachting’ fight against the Dutch was reserved for the kafir who demanded submission and brought overheersching; the inter-Atjehnese hostilities of the time were ‘tooneelachtig’ — theatrical.
The Oil Cijns and the Great Wealth
Before the end of the nineteenth century the oil-interests of the kafirs had begun to smooth the paths of the old friendship. The petroleum cijns made the old chief rich. After 1912 the cijns came into the landschapskas and the oeléebalang received a fixed income. In 1910 he visited Java, where his son was at school in Bandoeng; he also visited the blind institute, the girls’ school and the hat-plaiting workshops there, and stayed for a time at Batavia, where his sister was then living with her husband, an Atjehnese chief who had been banished to Ternate but was permitted in 1910 to live in Batavia. In 1913 he was able to hand over the government to his son, Teukoe Tjhi Mohamad Thajeb, and in 1914 he undertook the pilgrimage to Mekka — nine months out and home, by the steamship Riouw, with twenty relatives and two servants in his following. After his return he went once more to Batavia, to his sister, who in 1916 returned to Atjeh as a widow.
Retirement at Boga
The old chief then retired to his new substantial house at Boga on the sea, where he had planted his own coco-palms. Broersma describes the meeting there: ‘een krasse baas, groot, roodbruin, grove rimpels op gelaat en handen. Hij droeg een hoogst eenvoudige kleeding: de kopia op het groote hoofd, een donkerblauw linnen buis, een kain, sloffen. Ons bood hij stoelen, zelf zette hij zich op een matje op den vloer.’ He was then, by his son’s reckoning, ninety years old. He lived with his second wife; of his sixteen children twelve were still alive, and there were many grandchildren. He still walked every morning along the sea, ‘waarover eenmaal de Nederlanders zijn gekomen, die al 50 jaar zijn vrienden zijn’ — over which once came the Netherlands, who have been his friends for fifty years.
Significance
Teukoe Tjhi is the type-figure of the vriendschap-policy on the east coast: the oeléebalang who recognised, before most of his peers, that the oil-interests and the colonial government could be turned to the advantage of his landschap. The early recognition by the Perlak chiefs of the oil-wealth of their soil is the political condition of the later development of the Perlak Petroleum-Mij and the Zuid-Perlak Petroleum-Mij at Rantau Pandjang.
See Also
- Peureula (Perlak)
- Teukoe Tjhi Mohamad Thajeb
- Peudawa Rajeu
- Koeala Boga
- Rantau Pandjang
- Perlak Petroleum-Mij
- Zuid-Perlak Petroleum-Mij
- Oeléebalang
- Tjhi (title)
- Tengkoe (honorific)
- Verkenningen in Atjeh (1923)
- 1873
- 1910
- 1913
- 1914
- Mekka
Source
Verkenningen in Atjeh, by Dr. R. Broersma (De Locomotief, October 1923), chapters V–VI, ‘Oeléebalang’s volkshoofden’, pp. 38–41. Also Atjeh en de Atjehers, by J. A. Kruyt (Leiden 1877), for the 1873–1875 setting.