Tanah Putih (Dutch Tana Poetih, “white land”) was a small Malay district on Sumatra’s East Coast, enumerated by Van der Kemp among the petty states which, in the early nineteenth century, carried on a direct trade with the British settlement at Penang. Although nominally a dependency of Acheh, Tanah Putih had in practice drifted into independence, and by 1824 was exposed both to the religious warfare of the Padris inland and to the intrigues of European powers along the coast. The state is mentioned in Van der Kemp’s article in a single but significant passage.
In the Sultan of Deli’s letter of 1824
The sole mention of Tanah Putih occurs in Appendix 6, where Van der Kemp prints the letter of 27 August 1824 from the Sultan of Deli to the new governor of Penang, Fullerton. The sultan reported that the Padris — the religious reformers then devastating the interior of Sumatra — had “determined to attack all the different states and render them tributary” and to impose their peculiar laws on the coast. “Many countries”, the sultan wrote, “have already been reduced to subjection and rendered tributary, amongst the rest are Tanah Putih, Balah and Panei, and they have now expressed their determination to attack Batu Bara and Delli”. The sultan declared that he would himself proceed to Batu Bara if hostilities broke out, and requested British assistance in resisting the Padri advance.
Place in the wider argument
The mention of Tanah Putih, though brief, serves Van der Kemp’s argument in two ways. First, it shows that by 1824 the Padri war — which the Dutch would later use as a justification for their expansion in Sumatra — had already reduced several of the East Coast states to subjection; the petty states which Fullerton would later (in his minute of 21 March 1825) describe as carrying on “extensive trade” with Penang were thus in fact gravely imperilled. Second, the letter of the Sultan of Deli, addressed to a British governor and appealing for British assistance, shows that even after the treaty of 1824 — by which Britain formally renounced political establishments on Sumatra — the East Coast chiefs continued to look to Penang as their natural protector. This is the practical background to Fullerton’s minute of March 1825 and to the Bellona affair of 1827–1828.
See Also
- Sumatra’s East Coast
- Sumatra
- Balah
- Panei
- Batu Bara
- Deli
- Sultan of Deli’s letter to Penang
- Robert Fullerton
- Padri War on Sumatra’s East Coast
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
Source
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159–239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.