Blang Kala was the mountain pass (pas van Blang Kala) between the VI and IV Moekims of Groot-Atjeh, the only short overland road between the two districts and therefore one of the most important passages of the whole war terrain. Its name is Acehnese: blang meaning plain or sawah field; the pass takes its name from the plain at the foot of the pass, often pleonastically called, in the Dutch writings, the plain of Blang Kala.
The terrain
The mountain chain over which the pass runs is rather wild country. Here and there stood pepper gardens and other cultivated plots — the pepper culture in Atjeh being conducted, as Meijer records, by a nomadic population in scattered huts withdrawn from all supervision, on ground that rose in steep foothills. The pass leads through a saddle, the spot where General Pel had bivouacked with his operating force on 16 January 1876 as he marched by it with the first conquest of the IV Moekims.
Its role in the war
Every march between the two districts went by it: Pel’s first invasion of January 1876; the raid of the bandits of Lampagar, said by the prisoners to have come over this pass; the operations of the July sweep, in which Major Diepenheim’s column marched through the pass to the saddle against the design in his instruction, on the same spot as Pel had bivouacked in January, searching for the mountain paths westward that, as his reports admitted, he had found too narrow for columns; and every Dutch patrol between Lampagar and the IV Moekims.
The pass opened westward into the drier ground of the IV Moekims near kampong Lampagar; between kampong and pass the ground is a plain — the blang whence its name — over which the works of the Dutch at Lampagar kept watch in these years. At its own saddle there runs, further west, the wilder mountain country in which the raiding bands of the XXII Moekims used to hide between the two regions.
See Also
Source
Atjeh van 26 December 1875 tot 4 September 1876, door H. F. Meijer (Breda: P. B. Nieuwenhuijs, 1883), chapters IV (pp. 70–71) and VII (pp. 211–214).