Pasar Tjurup (also Pasar Tjurap, modern Pasar Curup) is a village in the Lebong district of Benkulen (Bencoolen), Sumatra, whose Hadji Ismael — a local Muslim pilgrim (Hadji) — showed samples of gold ores to the manager of the Suban Ajam coffee estate in 1895 or 1896, thereby arousing the European interest in the Lebong gold that led, in the same year, to the discovery of the famous Lebong Donok gold-bearing quartz outcrop near Muara Aman and to the establishment of the “Lebong Goud Syndicaat”. Pasar Tjurup is the geographical origin-point of the European gold-mining industry of Sumatra, and Hadji Ismael of Pasar Tjurup is the individual to whom the colonial record attributes the founding act of that industry.
The 1895/1896 discovery
Van Bemmelen’s account of the 1895/1896 discovery, in the gold-and-silver chapter of *The Geology of Indonesia* (1949), reads:
“In 1895 or 1896 European interest for gold in this region arose suddenly due to the fact that Mr. [of] the coffee estate Suban Ajam was shown samples of gold ores by Hadji Ismael of Pasar Tjurup. Then a large outcrop of gold-bearing quartz at Lebong Donok near Muara Aman was shown by native gold washers and this discovery led to the establishment of the ‘Lebong Goud Syndicaat’.”
The Hadji Ismael of Pasar Tjurup is the only named indigenous individual in the colonial record of the Lebong Donok discovery, and his showing of the gold-ore samples to the European coffee-estate manager is the founding act of the European gold-mining industry of Sumatra. The Hadji title indicates that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and his role in the discovery accordingly suggests that the Lebong gold trade was, before the European intervention, in the hands of a Muslim (possibly Hadhrami-Arab) trading network of the kind that the Hadji title typically denotes in the colonial East Indies.
Significance for Atjeh
Pasar Tjurup is significant for the encyclopedia of Acheh history because the 1895/1896 gold-ore showing by its Hadji Ismael is the founding act of the European gold-mining industry of Sumatra, and accordingly the founding act of the same colonial mineral economy that would, by 1940–1941, extend onto Atjeh territory with the M.A.E.M. dredges at the Geudong Concession. The Hadji Ismael of Pasar Tjurup is, in this sense, the historical precursor of the native gold washers who later showed the Lebong Donok outcrop to the European, and of the native informants who would later guide the Jansen-Lindberg-Wolvekamp 1922 survey of the Atjeh interior and the De Groot 1946 report on the Meulaboh placers.
See Also
- Acheh
- Atjeh gold exploration (1922, 1946)
- B. B. Lindberg
- Benkulen
- C. de Groot
- Gold and silver in Atjeh
- H. Wolvekamp
- Lebong Donok
- Muara Aman
- P. Hövig
- P. J. J. Jansen
- Van Bemmelen’s The Geology of Indonesia (1949)
- 1895
- 1896
Source
The Geology of Indonesia, by R. W. van Bemmelen, Vol. II: Economic Geology (The Hague: Government Printing Office; Martinus Nijhoff, 1949), p. 107 (Lebong Donok discovery, with the Hadji Ismael of Pasar Tjurup reference).